Three dad and mom—Reni Cao, Xiao Zhang, and Susan Rosenthal—had been anxious about their kids’s display time, in order that they left their tech jobs to create a product that encourages kids to interact with the true world whereas additionally serving to them be taught a brand new language. Their transfer has paid off, as the corporate just lately raised $4.8 million in funding.
The newly launched gadget is known as Dex and resembles a high-tech magnifying glass with a digital camera lens on one aspect and a touchscreen on the opposite. When children use the machine to take photos of objects, the AI makes use of picture recognition know-how to establish the item and interprets the phrase into the chosen language. It additionally options interactive story classes and video games.
Whereas kid-focused language studying apps like Duolingo Youngsters exist, Dex argues that it takes a extra participating method that emphasizes hands-on experiences, permitting kids to immerse themselves within the language.
“We’re attempting to show genuine language in the true world in a means that’s interactive,” Cao instructed TechCrunch. “The youngsters usually are not solely listening or doing what they’re instructed to do, however moderately, they’re truly pondering, creating, interacting, operating round, and simply being interested by issues, and purchase the required language related to these ideas and objects.”
Dex is designed for teenagers ages 3 to eight years previous and presently helps Chinese language, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish. It additionally gives assist for 34 dialects, together with Egyptian Arabic, Taiwanese Mandarin, and Mexican Spanish.
Along with object recognition, Dex encompasses a library of interactive tales that encourage kids to actively take part within the narrative. Because the story unfolds, children are prompted to reply, corresponding to greeting characters within the language they’re studying.
The machine comes with a devoted app for folks to see an in depth overview of their youngster’s progress, together with the vocabulary phrases they’ve realized, the tales they’ve engaged with, and the variety of consecutive days they’ve used Dex.
Techcrunch occasion
San Francisco
|
October 27-29, 2025
Moreover, Dex is presently creating a function that enables children to ask an AI chatbot questions and have interaction in free-form conversations. This function is already out there to some testers, however the firm admits it isn’t prepared for a wider rollout. Mother and father may also be cautious about introducing AI chatbots to their kids.
Throughout our testing of Dex, we had considerations about the potential of a toddler studying inappropriate phrases. Cao assured us that “inflexible security prompts” are included each time the big language mannequin is used throughout imaginative and prescient, reasoning, and text-to-speech.
He stated, “We’ve an always-on security agent that evaluates conversations in real-time and filters conversations with a secure cease glossary. The agent will suppress dialog if any of the cease phrases are talked about, together with however not restricted to these associated to sexuality, faith, politics, and many others. Mother and father will quickly be capable of additional add to personalised cease phrase lists.”
Plus, it stated that the AI is skilled utilizing vocabulary requirements much like these present in Britannica Youngsters and different kids’s encyclopedias.
In our testing, the AI efficiently ignored subjects associated to nudity. Nevertheless, it did acknowledge and precisely translate the time period “gun,” one thing dad and mom ought to take into account when buying the machine.
In response to our findings, Cao instructed us, “Regulation-wise, I’m not anxious, however I do assume this presents a priority, particularly amongst [some] dad and mom.” He added that these considerations have pushed the corporate to quickly introduce an choice in settings to filter out particular phrases, corresponding to weapons, cigarettes, vape pens, fireworks, marijuana, and beer bottles.
Dex additionally has a zero knowledge retention coverage. Whereas this implies there’s no threat of delicate or private pictures being saved, one draw back could possibly be that oldsters are left at the hours of darkness about the kind of content material their children could also be capturing.
Dex can be actively working in the direction of acquiring COPPA certification, which might make it compliant with the Youngsters’s On-line Privateness Safety Act.
The corporate secured funding from ClayVC, EmbeddingVC, Parable, and UpscaleX. Notable angel traders embody Pinterest founder Ben Silbermann, Curated co-founder Eduardo Vivas, Lillian Weng, who’s the previous head of security at OpenAI, and Richard Wong (ex-Coursera).
The machine is priced at $250, which feels steep for a product designed for youngsters. Nevertheless, Dex positions itself as a extra reasonably priced various to hiring a tutor, which may cost as much as $80 per hour, or attending a language immersion faculty, which may value a number of hundred to even hundreds of {dollars}.
Dex says that a whole bunch of households have already bought the machine.
