This Father Raised Over $50 Million to Make the Internet a Safer Place for Children
The Problem No One Was Solving
Nearly a billion kids and teens play games online, in spaces that are not appropriate or safe for them. Most platforms still 'verify' age the same way they did a decade ago: a pop-up that asks if you're over thirteen, without actually verifying the facts.
When one country introduced real-name ID verification for online gaming, the number of grandparents playing popular games jumped five thousand percent. The kids had grabbed grandma's ID and just kept playing.
A Lawyer Becomes a Father
Kieran Donovan spent over a decade watching this unfold from the inside. As a partner at one of the world's largest law firms, he advised tech and gaming companies on how to stay compliant across dozens of countries. He was the person publishers called when they needed to figure out whether a thirteen-year-old in South Korea could access the same features as a fifteen-year-old in Germany. He fielded the same panicked questions over and over.
Then he became a father. And the work stopped being abstract.
He looked at the digital world his kid would grow up in and saw every gap he'd spent years documenting from the legal side. The broken age gates. The platforms that genuinely didn't know children were using their products. The parents with no visibility into what their kids were doing online. And while he'd always been aware of the legal risks of these gaps, it suddenly became very personal.
But he also saw all of the opportunities for connection with loved ones, learning and creative experimentation that new technologies offered and didn't want his own kids excluded from experiencing the best that technology had to offer in a world where they would need to know how to use it.
"My big concern was that compromises were being made as penalties were getting really scary for companies," he said. "My nervousness was that in a worst-case scenario, platforms would say let's just exclude kids entirely because it's too scary."
$2 Billion in Fines and Counting
For years, regulators had looked the other way. They aren't anymore. In the last two years alone, some of the world's largest tech companies have paid over two billion dollars in fines for violating children's privacy laws. Hundreds of new rules are rolling out across different countries, each with different age thresholds, different consent requirements, different restrictions on things like chat, loot boxes, and public profiles. The penalties got so scary that some platforms started considering the simplest fix: just kick all the kids off.
Building k-ID
Kieran left his partnership and founded k-ID. The idea was simple but massive: build the infrastructure that helps every platform understand when a user is a child, and then adapt the experience accordingly. Not a binary gate that kids can lie their way through – or that only helps platforms exclude kids, but an age-aware layer that works across countries, platforms, and devices. k-ID orchestrates multiple privacy preserving age assurance technologies, and gives parents a single hub where they can manage consent and permissions across all the games and services their kids are accessing through k-ID's Family Connect. And its Compliance Developers Kit (CDK) allows platforms to add and remove experiences and content within their games or platforms based on a user's age. So kids can still play an MMO game but strangers can't chat with them; or they can go on a quest, but loot boxes are replaced with simple coins depending on the age restrictions of each jurisdiction.
The Avengers
He assembled a team that matched the scale of the problem. Jeff Wu, who built the first trust and safety teams at Google and Facebook. Julian Corbett, who had run publishing at Take-Two and Tencent. Timothy Ma, one of the world's leading experts on children's privacy. Kieran called them his Avengers.
"I was going to fix this for everyone so that kids can have a better and safer experience online," he said. "That's what kicked me off."
Today, k-ID serves over forty million users daily. They raised 45 million dollars from Lightspeed and Andreessen Horowitz. The World Economic Forum named them a Technology Pioneer. They were named a Best Invention of the Year by Time Magazine in 2025. The business is growing quickly.
Finding Manus
But protecting kids across a hundred and ninety-five countries with well over 200 legal jurisdictions means processing an enormous amount of legal data, research, and client reporting. k-ID's small team needed to move faster than the regulations were changing. They found their answer in Manus.
Kieran was the first person at k-ID to try it. He asked Manus to pull up a popular mobile game and analyze its policies for kid and teen compliance. He watched it navigate the website, review the legal language, and produce a full markdown report in the chat thread. He called it his lightbulb moment.
That single experiment turned into company-wide adoption. k-ID now runs over eight thousand Manus sessions across the team. Their US-based data team, led by Aaron and Rupali, spends roughly five hundred dollars a day on Manus credits at peak usage, accounting for eighty-five percent of the company's total. They built a dashboard that gives them real-time visibility into systems managing over 40 million daily users, flagging verification failures by location and method. When global social media platforms need custom reports, Manus generates the PDFs in seconds. That work used to take a full team several weeks.
The marketing team built a multi-agent system that runs their entire go-to-market workflow. A master briefing agent pulls context from Notion, Linear, and HubSpot, then hands off to individual agents that generate press releases, blog posts, social content, and sales outreach in a consistent voice. The whole thing fires with a single click.
The Mission
Kieran didn't build k-ID to be a compliance product. He built it because he looked at his own kid and decided the internet needed to be safer for every kid. Manus handles the operational weight so his team can stay focused on that mission.
"The time for change is now," he said. "The world demands safer, more empowered online experiences for youth."
