Troomi Wireless (Orem, UT), a mobile device company focused on mental wellness, launched its app store on earlier this month. Unlike other platforms, Troomi gives parents the flexibility of a broad app store while keeping 100% control over what their kids can access.
Orem, Utah, December 13, 2024
Troomi Wireless, an Orem Utah-based mobile device company focused on mental wellness launched app store last week. Troomi's app gives parents the flexibility of a broad app store while keeping 100% control over what their kids can access.
With a team of 50, Troomi places a custom OS on top of Android, allowing parents to set guardrails for their children’s protection, while still preserving the usefulness the kids need from a smartphone in the modern world.
Troomi’s lead investor is SpringTide Ventures, headquartered in Boston with an office and an annual summer retreat in Park City. Troomi’s CEO and founder Bill Brady sat down with TechBuzz to explain how he got connected with SpringTide:
“They actually reached out to us when we were doing our seed round in November of 2022. They knew that seemed out of place since they primarily invest in the health sector, however they see our product as the solution to the youth mental health crisis, and they’ve just been an amazing partner.”
Brady plans to raise more funding in the future, as he stated:
“We’ll be doing a Series A round in 2025, which we think will open up new opportunities for marketing and for the extension of our reach.”
Troomi has seen significant growth since its inception, as Brady stated:
“We recently completed our first 36 months in the market. During that time frame, we had a 375% compound annual growth rate. We’ve got users in every state in the country, and we see ourselves as one of the pioneers in this new category of Kids Safe Devices.”
Brady founded the company during the COVID lockdown of 2020. Perhaps not the best time for him to found a new company, Brady explained:
“It was March of 2020 when the pandemic started, and my mom had passed away, it was a difficult time but I still decided to start Troomi.”
Brady started the company alongside his Co-founder David Preece, with the philosophy that parents should be able to balance the necessary uses of their kids’ tech with its unnecessary uses.
“On one hand you have all the good aspects of technology, and need to understand that kids will need to learn how to use technology effectively, it’s part of life now," said Brady. "Then you contrast that with all the damage it can do, such as excessive screen time or pornography. This often leads to loneliness and depression among the younger generation, and so we’re providing parents a better fix to this than what’s currently available.”
While founding Troomi, Brady and Preece reviewed the offerings at the time in the smartphone marketplace. They noticed there’s two extremes: the fully unlocked phone which gives kids unrestricted internet and screen time access, and the nearly fully locked phone which is wildly impractical for today’s world.
Brady says Troomi intends to bridge this gap.
“Our goal is to create something which is legitimately safer, and which is much more flexible, since many of those locked down phones aren’t even secure. Troomi is designed such that you can custom fit a safe phone to an eight year old or a sixteen year old, and still have it be practical to meet their needs. The phone is designed so that it grows with your kids.”
Troomi has partnered with Samsung; it uses the Samsung Galaxy A15 as the main hardware to run their custom OS.
Brady explained, “We're a Samsung partner, and have always used Samsung devices for the quality and name recognition. The child gets the device, our operating system is already on it, and to them it just looks and feels like an Android phone.”
One of the key features of Troomi is the Parent Portal. Brady described it as follows:
“Parents can manage the device through the Parent Portal. Since it’s a web app, they can access it from any device and any platform. There’s many features to Troomi, giving parents the ability to specify what they do and don’t want their kids to be able to access on their phone."
Brady shared examples for what Troomi can do:
“We’ve used some industry leading filters to take what’s in the Google Play Store, and have narrowed it down to about 1,000 popular apps which we think are necessary or beneficial to most users. However, we recognize there may be lesser known apps which haven’t been screened by us, but need to be used by the user. So, the parents can allow apps from the Google Play Store even if it hasn’t been directly allowed by us.”
Troomi also adds custom badges to apps to state if it has advertising or an in app browser, as Brady explained:
“One of the problems with the Google Play Store is the amount of inaccuracy in app categorization. For every 1,000 apps that we vet, we find 1,500 mistakes in how those apps have been categorized. If a parent or another platform is just relying on Google descriptions, they’re probably getting inaccurate descriptions. Troomi adds badges to apps to let parents know exactly how safe an app really is.”
Troomi also recognizes how kids may attempt to alter or remove the operating system from the device. They’ve made it ‘as tamper proof as possible,’ as Brady pointed out:
“We’ve taken Android and built 10 million lines of code on top to do everything we want it to. Our Chief Technology Officer has a deep background in building security applications, and we’ve leveraged his expertise to build the OS to be as tamper proof as possible.”
Another one of Troomi’s key features is its web browser. Brady told TechBuzz how it works:
“The browser is disabled by default, and can be activated through the parent portal. From there you can specify what domains your child can have access to. The child doesn’t have the search ability, they just will see those domains from a drop down menu. The browser also has AI enabled so websites can get vetted in real time according to parameters the parents set.”
A new idea that Troomi is beginning development around is called Digital Wellness. Its goal is to attempt to improve a child's mental health through the use of AI.
“We’ve recently introduced an AI mental health companion called Trudy, which is available for all users at no extra charge, all you need to do is activate it since it’s disabled by default. Once enabled, kids can converse with her,” said Brady.
He continued:
“Other tools similar to this start off assuming the person is in a bad mental state. Trudy gives kids positive conversation prompts to start off. Depending on how the child responds, Trudy will listen and give guard-railed responses. It won’t ever get into sensitive topics best discussed with a parent. It can also give parents a dashboard with insights into what a child’s predominant emotions are. This allows parents to know what their children may be excited or worried about.”
Troomi primarily obtains users from Google ads, but it also has other ways of advertising.
“Google ads are where the majority of our sales come from. However, we also have had social media influencers be another big component in advertising. We’re also currently on the lookout for partnerships to reach the right audience in an effective way,” explained Brady.
Troomi proudly states its pricing has remained the same over the last two years. “We think our society has had enough of inflation. We are pleased to declare that we haven’t changed our prices since March of 2022. Our basic plan with unlimited talk and text, access to the safe listing feature, and access to the content filtering feature is still $19.95 per month. If you want to add group messaging and the ability to send photos, it’s $24.95 a month. Then, to have everything, including the Troomi app store and the safe web browser, that’s $29.95 a month.”
Brady has some future plans for Troomi. He shared with TechBuzz:
“The next biggest thing is the full launch of the Troomi web browser later this month. Then in 2025 we’ll be adding to our Parent Portal with even more features and functionalities to help parents understand how their kids are doing.”
One feature of Troomi which users enjoy is how easy it is to set up the phone, Brady says:
“A mom in Texas who has nine children got Troomi phones for five of them and posted on social media how she set up all five in just 30 minutes. Our focus has always been on empowering parents, it’s not empowering them if it’s too hard to use, so we make it as easy as possible to set up and use.”
You can learn more about Troomi by clicking the link here. See a video of Bill Brady discussing Troomi with Tara Spalding, along with Abby Warner, in Tara's Tara10 Series here.
