
He built five mobile apps, won four hackathons with a friend from second grade, and left Purdue. Now Krish Iyengar wants children to direct the stories on their screens - and is using the same machinery to rethink video production.

A Navy cockpit taught him discipline. Early Amazon taught him distribution. Three daughters taught him the question that mattered: what happens after a child presses play?
Parents bought the padded speaker to escape the screen. tonies turned that relief into a collectible media ecosystem where every new character makes the box - and the business - more useful.

She took a storybook company into apps, audio, events, and women's sports. The operating idea is simple: confidence grows when girls can see more lives available to them.
Rebel Girls is a global, multi-platform empowerment brand for Generation Alpha girls, built around true stories of extraordinary women. What began as a record-breaking Kickstarter book, Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls, has grown into a franchise of best-selling books, an award-winning podcast, an Apple Design Award-winning app, and a licensed merchandise line. A certified B Corporation and Women-Owned business, Rebel Girls has sold roughly 13 million books across 62 languages, logged more than 30 million podcast downloads, and set a goal of reaching 50 million girls.
Maka Kids is a Detroit-based children's media company building an ad-free, algorithm-free streaming app for kids ages 0 to 6. Founded in 2023 by Isabel Sheinman and Tanyella Leta, the company designs screen time around child well-being rather than engagement. Every piece of content is scored against Maka Imprint, a patent-pending developmental framework built over two years of research with the Yale Child Study Center that maps seven domains of early childhood development across more than 650 indicators. Maka raised $3 million in seed funding led by Michigan Rise in May 2026.