AI Startup L1ght Raises $15M Seed Round To Protect Children From Cyberbullying

Israeli anti-toxicity startup L1ght, which uses AI to detect and filter harmful content to protect children from online toxicity, announced Tuesday it has raised $15 million in a seed round co-led by Mangrove Capital Partners, Tribeca Venture Partners, and Western Technology Investment.

Founded in December 2018 by veteran entrepreneurs Zohar Levkovitz and Ron Porat, the company says it’s on a mission to eradicate online toxicity from the lives of children around the world.

L1ght’s algorithms were designed by a multidisciplinary team of cybersecurity experts, data scientists, psychologists, and anthropologists. This enables the company to surpass what is possible with standard mathematical-based AI and standard machine learning algorithms, to provide a suite of solutions that are significantly more sophisticated than existing content moderation and filtering tools.

L1ght’s proprietary algorithms provide a full solution for social networks, communication apps, gaming platforms, and hosting providers to identify and eradicate cyberbullying, harmful content, hate speech, and predatory behavior. The company built technology that can detect and predict toxic content in online text, audio, videos, or images.

L1ght will use the funding for R&D and to scale the platform to meet market demand for a scalable solution that accurately detects toxic and abusive online material in real-time.

“As both a father and entrepreneur, L1ght’s mission statement is very personal to me.” said Zohar Levkovitz, L1ght co-founder and CEO. “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.” 

“Tribeca Venture Partners is thrilled to join the L1ght team on its incredibly important mission – protecting children online,” said Chip Meakem, Managing Partner of Tribeca Venture Partners. “After working with Zohar and his team for quite some time we are confident L1ght is uniquely positioned to help solve this massive societal problem.  Now, the real work begins, which is to distribute L1ght’s proprietary algorithms to major online platforms and providers across the globe.”

“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,” added Roy Saar, partner at Mangrove.

Levkovitz tells VentureBeat that the company is currently working with “several active customers” but won’t go into more detail.