Kidas raises money from Overwolf to protect young gamers from cyberbullies

Overwolf, the platform for building in-game apps and mods, has invested in Kidas, the creators of the ProtectMe anti-cyberbullying and predator protection software for PC games.

The funding includes a partnership that enables Overwolf to offer seamless integration of the Kidas technology to its over 27 million monthly active users.

With the rapid growth and advancement of technology and access to digital technology, children are more exposed to cyberbullying, scams, and privacy violations through text, online chats, and video games than ever before. ProtectMe by Kidas, goes beyond keyword recognition and uses algorithms that are able to understand context to get new, accurate, and situational insight to warn parents.

It can warn about dangerous encounters children come by while playing video games. For every ten families who use ProtectMe, at least four of them will receive threat detected alerts. Kidas works with anti-bullying and child psychologists to provide recommendations to parents when their child is exposed to bullying, online predators, sexual content, hate speech, and other toxic behaviours on online multiplayer PC games.

“This partnership perfectly aligns to Overwolf’s stance on responsible gameplay and supports our core values of gaming safe and with integrity,” said Avner Florenthal, vice president of business development at Overwolf, in a statement.

Currently, Kidas supports 120 of today’s most popular games. And this partnership enables ProtectMe to be integrated into over 9,000 titles in Overwolf’s game library, extending the application of the ProtectMe technology beyond protecting children and families into protecting players across all platforms.

“Sixty-four percent of players aged 7 to 15 years old suffer from bullying or harassment in video games,” said shared Ron Kerbs, Kidas CEO, in a statement. “With an increasing number of online gaming, the issue of gaming security has become a top priority for parents who often have little visibility into their children’s online gaming interactions. We’ve had numerous stories from parents reporting how ProtectMe has saved their families lives from scams to online predators. We are excited that our integration with the Overwolf platform will give us an opportunity to continue to expand into more games and provide a greater level of protection for families.”

The company has nine employees and it previously raised $2.75 million.

I asked Kerbs what was the inspiration for the company. In an email, he said, “The inspiration was after I read an article about a child in the suburbs of Philadelphia who was sexually assaulted by someone she met online. We started in 2019 as a student project at Wharton business school. In the summer of 2020, we started to work full time on it.”