We’re thrilled to share that Yoto, the screen-free audio platform for children, has raised $22M in a round led by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, with significant participation from DNS Capital and continued backing from Acton Capital and Burda Principal Investments. CZI’s Vivian Wu joins the board.
Yoto has been part of the Emerge community since day one, and what founders Ben Drury and Filip Denker have built since has outrun even our own sky-high expectations.
We backed Ben and Filip at a time when “kids’ hardware” was a phrase most investors backed away from – on the incredible strength of the team, a handful of devoted families and their first publisher deals.
The idea hasn’t changed since that first Kickstarter run sold out in 2019: pop a physical card into the player and it reads stories, plays music and runs activities – no camera, no microphone, no ads, no screen. Kids get control of their own listening; parents get a device they never have to police. Those devoted families turned out to be the whole story. Yoto spread the way the best children’s products always have – parent to parent, playground by playground – with celebrity fans arriving entirely unprompted.
The card library now runs to more than 1,200 titles, with licences spanning Disney, Penguin Random House, Universal, Warner Music, Sony Music, HarperCollins, Hachette and Macmillan – with household names such as Roald Dahl, Narnia, Peppa Pig, PAW Patrol and Sesame Street among them.
“When we backed Ben and Filip, the bet was that audio would become the format parents trust most for early learning. CZI leading this round – an investor whose whole mission is children’s development – is about the strongest endorsement of that thesis we could have asked for.”
Jan, Emerge
This funding will further grow the catalogue and bring Yoto’s brand of independent listening to even more children worldwide, following their $17M Series A in 2021.
Congratulations, Ben, Filip and the whole Yoto crew. Turn it up!
