Maka Kids builds screen time for how children grow.

Here is a business idea that sounds, on first hearing, like a mistake. Build a children's video app, spend two years and a lot of money making it good, and then design it so that kids watch less of it. No autoplay. No recommendation engine nudging one more episode. A little animated character who yawns and says the show is over. In an industry that has spent a decade turning "minutes watched" into a religion, Maka Kids decided to worship something else.

The company, legally Maka Media, Inc., was founded in 2023 by Isabel Sheinman and Tanyella Leta. The two had met a decade earlier and had already done a version of this once: their nonprofit, Nabu, put more than 15 million children's books into the hands of kids across 26 countries. Books are a forgiving medium. They do not have a "next episode" button. Screens do, and the founders decided the screens needed the same care as the reading had.

The pitch is narrow on purpose. Maka Kids is an iOS app for children ages zero to six. Parents pick a few channels — kindness, STEM, emotional regulation, movement — and the app serves curated, expert-reviewed video with no ads, no algorithm, and time limits that actually enforce themselves. When the time is up, the time is up. The novelty is not any single feature. It is that the incentives point the other way.

The engine underneath the app is called Maka Imprint, a patent-pending developmental framework the company built over two years of research with the Yale Child Study Center. It maps seven core domains of early childhood development across more than 650 indicators, and it grades content on things most parents never consciously register: pacing, stimulation, color contrast, narrative structure. A show can be charming and still fail the rubric. That is the point.

The company started on the East Coast and relocated to Detroit in 2025, setting up at Newlab. The move looks less accidental once you see who wrote the checks: a syndicate anchored by Michigan Rise and thick with Michigan-based backers. Geography, for Maka, was a choice.