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About us

Built by the generation
being monitored

We are six students who got tired of parental-control apps that treat children as suspects and parents as customers. So we built the one we'd have wanted in our own houses.

Our story

It started with a three-week argument about a phone

In 2023 one of us lost phone access for three weeks over something a monitoring app had flagged — wrongly, as it turned out, and there was no way to see what it had actually seen or to contest it. The app had read a group chat, summarised it badly, and nobody could check its work.

What stuck with us wasn't the punishment. It was that the software had no interest in being fair, and no interest in the relationship it was sitting in the middle of. It reported to one person and hid from the other.

So we started building in a school computer lab, testing on our own families, and asking a question the category mostly ignores: what would a monitoring app look like if the kid being monitored had to agree it was reasonable?

What we believe

Four rules we won't trade away

These have cost us features, and one investor conversation. They're staying.

No secret monitoring

If Optic is watching, it says so on the device, in the app list, and on a screen your child can open any time.

Signals, not transcripts

You get told there's a problem and where. You don't get a copy of a private conversation, because that ends the conversation.

Rules that age up

Controls set for an eleven-year-old shouldn't still be running at sixteen. Optic nags you to loosen them.

Never the product

No ads, no data resale, no "anonymised insights" sold to anyone. Subscriptions and school licences pay for this.

The team

Six students and one very patient advisor

We're between sixteen and nineteen, spread across three time zones, and we mostly ship on weekends. Names and photos below are placeholders for this demo site.

Maya Chen

Founder & product

Started Optic after a family argument about a phone that lasted three weeks. Handles product decisions and says no to feature requests.

Devin Osei

Lead engineer

Writes most of the sync layer and the desktop client. Believes any setup that takes more than five minutes will not get finished.

Priya Raman

Design

Designs the parent dashboard and the kid-facing app. Argues, correctly, that the child's screen matters more than the parent's.

Luca Moretti

Security & privacy

Runs our threat modelling and the on-device classification work. The reason no message content ever leaves the phone.

Aisha Bello

Windows enforcement

Owns the on-device enforcement engine — process and website blocking, screen-time budgets, and the reminder system.

Noah Kim

Community & support

Answers the support inbox, runs the parent panel, and turns what he hears there into next quarter's roadmap.

Team photo

1600 × 1200 · JPG

The six of us — landscape, natural light.

Where we work

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The school lab where Optic started.

Grown-up in the room

Dr. Helena Vasquez — safeguarding advisor

A child psychologist who reviews every alert category before it ships and tells us, regularly, when a feature would do more harm than good. Optic's refusal to show message transcripts came directly from these reviews.

Founded2023, in a school computer lab
Team6 students, 1 advisor, 0 offices
FundingTwo grants and a lot of unpaid weekends
BasedNowhere in particular — we ship from three time zones

Milestones

How we got here

2023 — Spring
The argument
A bad flag, a three-week phone ban, and the realisation that nobody could audit the software that caused it.
2023 — Autumn
First prototype
A screen-time tracker for Windows, running on the family PC it was built to protect.
2024 — Summer
Kid-visible mode
The feature that made Optic different: every block, warning and nudge arrives as a popup, so nothing happens silently.
2025 — Spring
Enforcement modes
Block, Enforce and Remind on per-time-of-day schedules, plus a rule assistant you talk to in plain English.
2026 — Today
Windows, done properly
One platform, a parent dashboard, and a support inbox we still answer ourselves.

Working with us

We answer our own email

There's no support tier and no chatbot. If you write to us, one of the six people above reads it — usually within a day, sometimes after school.

hello@optic.fyi

Schools and clinicians: ask about the classroom licence, it's free under thirty devices.

Try what we built.

Free for three devices, no card, no ads. If you hate it, uninstalling takes one tap and takes your data with it.

Download Optic Free for families · Windows 10 & 11