At 14, Sasha Bagrov is building a safer marketplace for teenage odd jobs
Tech.eu Cate Lawrence
A 14-year-old in London built KidsHustle, a job app for teens with parents built in. It’s trying to make doorstep cash safer — and open up a market big platforms shut out.
Based on reporting by Tech.eu, Cate Lawrence — read the original for the full story.
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Sasha Bagrov is 14, in Year 10 at Hampton School in London, and now runs what he says is the UK’s first iOS marketplace for teenage jobs. KidsHustle launched in April 2026 after roughly three years of work, much of it done by Bagrov himself around school, with some back-end help from his friend Gabriel.
The idea started with a simple scene: teenagers knocked on his family’s door offering to wash the car. Bagrov looked at that and saw the obvious problem adults tend to miss until later. Cash, strangers, no parent knowing where anyone is. That turned into a product built around teenage work, but also around the awkward fact that most of the big gig platforms are closed to under-18s.
KidsHustle targets the UK’s 3.6 million teenagers aged 13 to 17, which it pegs as a £1.2 billion casual labour market. Jobs on the app include gardening, babysitting, dog walking, tutoring and tech help. A parent creates a Stripe-verified account, posts the task and approves applications. Once a teenager starts work, they check in with a QR code that triggers live GPS sharing for the parent. Payment sits in escrow until the job is done, and the teenager gets a reference they can use on a CV.
Safety is the whole pitch here, and it shows up in the small things. Parents see more before job owners see who the teenager is. Job owners only review applicants after parental approval. When the teen arrives, they scan a unique QR code tied to the job owner, so the app can confirm they are at the right house. Photos of the finished work create a paper trail. KidsHustle also says it can use geolocation to alert parents if a teenager leaves a set area, and teens have buttons to call 999 or contact the safety team.
AI is part of the filter too. KidsHustle uses Google Gemini to judge whether a task is age-appropriate, including spotting risks a human might miss, such as moving heavy boxes or taking parcel deliveries where the contents are unknown. The company says it has completed a Data Protection Impact Assessment and complies with GDPR and the Children’s Code, while collecting less data from minors and avoiding promotional UI. So far, it says there have been no safety incidents.
Bagrov is now looking to raise £500,000 in pre-seed funding, but he still has GCSEs to get through. That tension runs through the whole story: a teenager building for teenagers, inside the rules adults set, while those rules are often not written for him at all.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the rare teen startup that isn’t pretending adolescence is a bug to be hacked away. The real story is how much paperwork, parental oversight and compliance it takes to let young people do something as basic as earn money. The market didn’t need another flashy gig app; it needed someone to admit safety is part of the product, not a footnote.
Read more about this at: Tech.eu
