Anti-toxicity Startup L1ght recently secured $15 million in seed funding from Mangrove Capital Partners, Tribeca Venture Partners, and Western Technology Investment.
The company aims to reduce instances of cyberbullying and the propagation of harmful content by using artificial intelligence (AI) to detect and predict these activities.
By integrating with social networks, communication and messaging applications, and online games, the platform can readily notify site owners, developers, and publishers to take action against such behavior.
L1ght's proprietary algorithms can identify various forms of online toxicity such as hate speech, harassment, bullying, and other forms of malicious content.
It can scan and evaluate various formats including text, graphics, audio, and video which is a crucial capability considering the prevalence of rich media on the internet that are readily accessible to children. L1ght is not consumer facing, but rather B2B focused and integrates directly to the social networks.
Co-founder and CEO Zohar Levkovitz hopes that L1ght would help curb the ill effects of online toxicity on children and young people.
Cyberbullying has been associated with the increased risk of self-harm and suicidal behavior in young people. Just recently, a video of a bullied Australian boy went viral globally.
The video captured the distressing effects of bullying and even included the boy's pleas to commit self-harm.
“As both a father and entrepreneur, L1ght’s mission statement is very personal to me. My co-founder Ron Porat and I started L1ght because we saw the dangers our children were facing online and felt not enough has been done to address these problems. Our main priority has always been to keep kids safe and this investment is further proof that our technology can accomplish that. I’m honored and grateful to have our mission at L1ght validated through this seed round from true industry titans," said Levkovitz.
The funding enables the company to invest more in research and development. L1ght aims to improve upon its algorithms to speed up processing and perform accurate detection of harmful content in real time.
L1ght employs a multidisciplinary team consisting of cybersecurity experts, psychologists, anthropologists, and data scientists to work on its platform.
By bridging various areas of study, L1ght aims to go beyond what standard mathematical-based AI and standard Machine Learning algorithms can achieve and build a more capable platform.
Investors are drawn by the benevolence of L1ght's mission and goals. The significant seed funding emphasizes the real need for innovative solutions to the growing problem of online toxicity.
Roy Saar, Partner at Mangrove: "We conducted research and found that the benefits of the internet, unfortunately, come with an increasing amount of toxicity against children. This toxicity is expensive for us as a society. We looked into this space for quite some time and were highly impressed by L1ght's vision and founding members."
L1ght is already working with several organizations to test out and further refine its platform. Under AntiToxin Technologies, L1ght’s technology was instrumental to removing over 130,000 accounts of suspected predators on WhatsApp.
Disclaimer: This is a contributed article and should not be taken as investment advice
