Participated · Equity · Aug 2025

Dex is an AI-powered handheld camera and touchscreen device designed to teach children ages 3–8 new languages by recognizing objects and translating words, and by offering interactive story lessons and games. It supports Chinese, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish, plus 34 dialects including Egyptian Arabic, Taiwanese Mandarin, and Mexican Spanish. The product includes a parent app that shows vocabulary learned, story engagement, and consecutive-day usage; the device retails for $250 and hundreds of families have purchased it. Dex is developing an AI chatbot for free-form conversations that is available to some testers but is not yet ready for wide rollout. The company enforces safety measures—an always-on safety agent, stop-word filtering, vocabulary trained to children's standards, and a zero data retention policy—and is working toward COPPA certification. Founders Reni Cao, Xiao Zhang, and Susan Rosenthal left tech jobs to build the product and company.