Parents understand the challenge of keeping young children engaged in online learning. Nurture is a new app designed for kids ages 4 to 7 with interactive content and games to keep them engaged. The company's mission is to equip kids with important life skills, including social skills, basic financial understanding, mindfulness, fitness and nutrition, through story-based adventures that actively engage kids.
Nurture on Wednesday announced a $2.8 million pre-seed round led by Golden Gate Ventures that will be used to hire preschool content creators to help develop content for the platform.
Nurture's first flagship title is called “Doki's Delivery” and focuses on helping kids learn social-emotional skills. The series follows a group of characters on a mission to deliver eggs in a spaceship.
Image credit: Nurture
The app also includes a dual-screen component, requiring parents to download the Nurture TV app on their Fire TV or Google TV to allow kids to interact with both screens. In “Doki's Delivery,” kids can use their phone or tablet as a game controller while playing on the TV screen. By tilting their mobile device left and right, they can help the character avoid obstacles.
Other interactions include answering phone calls from the protagonist, designing spaceships, and hatching mysterious eggs that the player then cares for, similar to the popular children's toy, Tamagotchi.
“We didn't want it to be passive, mindless screen time. We wanted it to be an active, interactive learning experience,” co-founder and CEO Roger Egan told TechCrunch.[Once kids] Once they understand the concepts, they use games and interactive tools to practice and apply their skills.”
The company plans to release new original content focused on “growth mindset and financial thinking,” as Egan explained. Additionally, Nurture is in talks with about 20 popular third-party creators to bolster its content library. Nurture's creator platform allows creators to host content on their own digital “islands,” which users can access by swiping through the app menu.
Image credit: Nurture
In addition to the immersive learning content, parents will be able to track their child's performance in the game.
“We have 'reflection moments' where questions can be asked and answered by the child, and we use those answers to synthesize the information and get a sense of how well the child understood the concept, and then we feed that back into the product and let parents know how their child is learning and progressing,” Egan said.
There are also offline activities that reinforce the concepts learned in the app and give parents ideas on how to encourage their children to apply the knowledge in everyday situations.
Nurture was founded in 2022, a few years after Egan's children began remote learning during the pandemic. With a frontline view of children's education, he believed traditional schooling was not adequately preparing children for a rapidly changing world, especially one powered by AI. In his opinion, children also need to learn adaptability, critical thinking, digital literacy, mindfulness, empathy, and more to be successful in the future. But he struggled to find a suitable alternative to supplement his children's education.
Egan previously founded Redmart, the online grocery store that was acquired by Alibaba. Co-founders Danny Limanseta (Chief Product Officer) was Redmart's Chief Product Officer and Sally Doherty (Chief People Officer) worked at Microsoft. Scott and Julie Stewart (Chief Creative Officer) are a husband-and-wife team that specializes in children's animated content, including “Lego Friends: The Next Chapter.”
Image credit: Nurture
In addition to being an investor, Priebe is also a game design advisor to Nurture. Priebe was responsible for creating Club Penguin, the hugely popular multiplayer online game.
“The next generation of kids are picking up the game quicker than they are watching the show,” Priebe said. “I really like the idea of not just sitting down and watching TV. [Nurture] The characters stop to invite you into the adventure and ask, 'So, what would you do?' or 'What would you want us to do about this?'”
Nurture is currently in invite-only beta, available only to users in the US, UK, and Canada, with plans to expand to other markets in 2025. The company also plans to offer paid subscriptions once the app is publicly available.
Other participants in the round include Reach Capital and Seedcamp, along with Club Penguin co-founder Lance Prieve. Other notable advisors include Manuel Bronstein, chief product officer at Roblox, Scott Kraft, former lead writer and executive producer of “Paw Patrol,” and Joey Mazzarino, the “Sesame Street” puppeteer known for his roles as Murray Monster, Stinky the Stinkweed, and other Muppets.