Wizenoze, the internet startup which launches a new safe search solution for children, has announced it has just closed a funding round for just over £1m to fuel its bid for the UK market.
The cash injection, worth €1.3m, brings the total raised by the company to €3.1m. The biggest contributor in the latest round was the Dutch government with a loan from its Innovation Credit fund, with the remainder made up by informal investors. Currently, more than 80% of the Dutch primary schools have access to WizeNoze’s technology.
In announcing the move, Diane Janknegt, founder and CEO of WizeNoze said:
“This will help hugely with our push into the UK market. We think there is a real need to create a new method for safeguarded internet search. That’s why we have built a vast repository of curated content, so that children’s online work will not be disturbed or distracted by commercial messages, or worse, by inappropriate or disturbing content.”
London Grid for Learning
WizeNoze aims to make information on the internet easier to find and understand for children, by building technology which curates and delivers reliable, appropriate and age-relevant content at a child’s specific reading level.
The company has also recently announced a partnership with the London Grid for Learning (LGfL) for a white label search solution for schools. In announcing that link, John Jackson, CEO of the LGfL said:
“Giving children access to safe, relevant and suitable content is a need expressed by many schools. Currently, we are piloting a solution, developed by the startup WizeNoze, that is exactly doing this. Instead of filtering out all inappropriate content, we give them access to reliable information, matching the individual reading level of a child.”
Editor’s notes:
WizeNoze is an Amsterdam-based company which aims to make online information accessible and meaningful for children, teenagers, people with lower literacy skills and second language learners. At the heart of the WizeNoze platform is a set of powerful classification algorithms that facilitate evaluation of the reading level a text is written on. The algorithms are the result of years of academic research into Information Retrieval, Natural Language Processing, and Machine learning.
Contact:
Tjadine Ullmann (UK Representative) +44 75 00 33 89 46
Diane Janknegt (Founder) +31 6 51 32 44 66
Diane Janknegt, Founder of WizeNoze, would be happy to offer an opinion piece for your publication on the growing importance of overseeing the information that children access online and how the battle to provide verifiable and appropriate content has never been more important than in this era of fake news. Contact her directly at diane@wizenoze.com.
