Anti-cyberbullying AI startup L1ght secures $15M seed funding to protect children from online toxicity

L1ght, a Tel Aviv, Israel-based AI startup designed to solve the crisis of online toxicity and how it impacts children, has raised $15M in a seed round 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. The round was co-led by Mangrove Capital Partners and Tribeca Venture Partners, as well as Western Technology Investment.

Founded in December 2018 by veteran entrepreneurs Zohar Levkovitz and Ron Porat, L1ght uses AI to detect and filter harmful online content to protect children.The startup is on a mission to eradicate online toxicity from the lives of children around the world. Its algorithms were designed by a multidisciplinary team of cyber security 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.

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

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.

“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.”