We’ve raised $8m to use generative AI to save our kids from YouTube

A father on a San Francisco-to-Cleveland flight saw the problem firsthand: his two-year-old was restless, the iPad came out, and the kids’ shows on offer felt too fast, too chopped up, too eager to move on. That moment became the seed for Giant, a startup built around a simple idea — children should shape the story instead of just watching it roll by.

The founder says he grew up on Sesame Street, Mister Rogers and Bob Ross reruns, with Choose Your Own Adventure books in the mix, and that older model still matters to him. What bugs him about YouTube Shorts isn’t just the content. It’s the reflex it trains: if attention slips for a second, swipe away. Giant is meant to work differently, giving kids room to invent characters, add ideas and decide where things go next.

There’s a broader market case hiding inside the parenting pitch. A 2025 Common Sense Media report found that 58% of American 4-year-olds have their own tablet, and that rises to 68% for 8-year-olds. Kids ages 5 to 8 are spending nearly three and a half hours a day on screens. The founder’s point is blunt: if children are going to spend that much time looking at a screen, the quality of what happens in those hours matters just as much as the clock.

Giant’s co-founder is David Silverman. The company says it is COPPA certified, has no ads, and gives parents visibility into everything their children create. It also says it uses systems to flag unsuitable content and thinks carefully about what its characters say, generate and how they answer kids. That’s the pitch: not a passive feed, but a real-time story that changes because a child had an idea. And if you’re going to sell that, starting with a worried parent is a pretty sensible way to do it.