VISR builds a parental safety app that scans children's social media and email for bullying, sexting, violence, and mental-health warning signs and alerts parents only when problems are detected. Parents can either enter a child's credentials or send the child a link to connect accounts; VISR supports Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Gmail and KidsEmail and plans to add more services. Aimed at parents of 8 to 14 year olds, the product leverages data science, semantic technology and natural language processing and lets parents help train the system by marking alerts as real or false. The service runs 22 alert categories across 48 classifiers covering issues such as bullying subtypes, sexting, explicit content, drugs, violence, irresponsible geo-tagging, late-night usage, and mental-health concerns including depression, self-harm and suicide. Since beta trials the Toronto-based startup has grown to a few thousand users and has sent roughly 16,000 alerts to date. VISR is free on iOS, Android and the web for now but plans to move to a $5/month subscription; it has also secured seed funding and government support to date.

Total raised

$1M

Funding rounds

1

Latest round

Seed

Latest activity

Nov 2015