Parents understand the challenge of keeping young children engaged in online learning. nursing A new app designed for kids ages 4-7, featuring interactive content and games to engage them. The company’s mission is to equip kids with essential life skills like socializing, basic financial understanding, mindfulness, fitness, nutrition, and more through story-based adventures that kids can actively participate in.
Nurture on Wednesday announced a $2.8 million seed funding round, led by Golden Gate Ventures. The funding will go toward recruiting preschool content creators to help develop content for the platform.
Nurture’s first major title is “Doki’s Delivery” and focuses on helping kids learn social and emotional skills. The series follows a group of characters who are on a mission to deliver an egg in a spaceship.
The app also features a dual-screen component that requires parents to download the Nurture TV app on Fire TV or Google TV so kids can interact between the two screens. For “Doki’s Delivery,” kids can use their phone or tablet as a game controller while playing on the TV screen. They can tilt the mobile device from side to side to help the characters avoid obstacles.
Other interactions include answering a call from the main character, designing a spaceship, and hatching a mystery egg, which players can then take care of – similar to the popular children’s toy Tamagotchi.
“I didn’t want to make it a passive, meaningless screen time. I wanted to make it an active, interactive learning experience,” co-founder and CEO Roger Egan told TechCrunch.[Once kids] “We get the concepts, then use games and interactive activities to practice and apply the skills.”
The company plans to release new original content focused on “growth mindsets and financial thinking,” Egan explained. Additionally, Nurture is in discussions with about 20 third-party creators to bolster its content library. Nurture’s platform allows creators to host content on their own digital “islands,” which users can access by swiping through the app’s menu.
In addition to comprehensive learning content, parents will have the ability to monitor their children’s performance in the games.
“We have what are called reflection moments where we ask questions, and the child can answer… From that answer, we can summarize that information and understand how well they understood the concept, and then feed that back into the product and tell parents how they’re learning and show progress,” Egan said.
There will also be offline activities to provide parents with ideas on how to reinforce the concepts they have learned in the app and encourage children to apply their knowledge in everyday situations.
Nurture was founded in 2022, a few years after Egan’s children began distance learning during the pandemic. Having closely followed his own children’s education, he believed that traditional education was not adequately preparing children for a rapidly changing world, especially one powered by artificial intelligence. In his view, children also needed to learn things like adaptability, critical thinking, digital literacy, mindfulness, and empathy in order to succeed in the future. However, he struggled to find suitable alternatives to supplement his children’s education.
Egan previously founded online grocery store RedMart, which was acquired by Alibaba. He is joined by co-founders Danny Limansita (Chief Product Officer), who served as Redmart’s head of product design; Sally Doherty (Chief People Officer), who previously worked at Microsoft; and Scott and Julie Stewart (Chief Creative Officers), a husband-and-wife team who specialize in animated content for kids, such as “Lego Friends: The Next Chapter.”
In addition to being an investor, he is also a game design consultant for Nurture. Priebe was responsible for creating Club Penguin, a hugely popular online multiplayer game.
“The next generation of kids are learning games faster than watching the show,” Priebe told us. “I really like the idea that you’re not going to sit there and watch linear TV anymore… It’s really new, how kids can learn games faster than watching the show.” [Nurture] The characters stop and take the child into the adventure, saying, “Now, what are you going to do?” or “How do you want us to do this?”
Currently, Nurture is in an invite-only beta for users in the US, UK, and Canada. The company plans to expand to other markets in 2025. The company will also launch a paid subscription once the app is open to the public.
Other participants in the round include Reach Capital and Seedcamp, with participation from Penguin Club co-founder Lance Priebe. Other notable advisors include Manuel Bronstein, chief product officer at Roblox; Scott Kraft, former head writer and executive producer of “Paw Patrol”; and Joey Mazzarino, the “Sesame Street” puppeteer known for his roles as Murray the Monster, Stinky the Stinkyweed, and other Muppets.