KidZui Caps Significant Progress in Difficult Year with $4M in Fresh Funding

KidZui’s founding chairman and CEO Cliff Boro called me from the airport last night to confirm recent reports saying that the San Diego startup, which has been developing a kid-friendly Internet browser, has raised $4 million in additional venture funding.

The four-year-old startup launched its KidZui browser (which is a Firefox add-on) in 2008, and Boro says KidZui now has more than 1 million registered users. The browser gives kids an authentic Internet experience by allowing them to surf hundreds of thousands of websites, watch online videos, and play games. It’s just that all of the content has been screened and approved by KidZui’s editorial team. But as the CEO explained to me last summer, it’s a tough market with already-established and well-funded rivals like PBSkids, Webkinz, Nickelodeon, and Club Penguin.

San Diego’s Mission Ventures led the $4 million round, and Boro tells me that Mission’s managing partner, Leo Spiegel, has joined KidZui’s board. KidZui previously raised almost $12 from Emergence Capital Partners, First Round Capital, Maveron, and other investors—and Boro says the VCs also joined in the latest round.

“We plan to use the funding for general working capital, and continue to work on making our product better and on expanding our partnerships,” Boro says.

The company recently arranged some high-profile partnerships. Under a deal with Best Buy, for example, the consumer electronics retailer now offers to load the KidZui browser as part of its software installation service. Through a new partnership with DreamWorks, KidZui is integrating the lead character from the animated movie “How to Train Your Dragon” in its social networking experience as part of an integrated sponsorship.

Boro says KidZui has increased its audience by 300 percent over the past year, “and spent less than $10,000 on marketing.”

Still, it hasn’t been an entirely smooth ride since last August. At that time, Boro told me he had reduced KidZui’s headcount to 25 staffers from 30. He’s laid off more workers since then, and KidZui now has 15 employees. “We definitely cut expenses last year and are running pretty lean,” Boro says. “We’ve made significant progress in a difficult year.”

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.