Helmit is my startup. Website: www.helmit.org
this is not a pitch. this is me thinking out loud about the problem I will probably spend the next ten years of my life on. some of it is polished, most of it is not. I keep adding to it.
the world today
ten years ago the biggest digital threat was a virus on your laptop.
today it’s a stranger in your kid’s DMs. a group chat that turns against one kid. a cloned voice calling your grandma for money. a deepfake nobody can tell apart from the real thing.
we protected our devices. we never protected the people using them.
and it’s getting worse, fast. with ai it gets easier and easier for attackers to run a huge number of really good attacks at the same time. and for normal people it gets harder and harder to even recognize what is real, what is fake and who they can trust.
right now the honest answer to “who protects you from that?” is: nobody. you are on your own. your kid is on their own. your grandma is on her own.
the world with Helmit
a 10 year old gets their first smartphone. the parents don’t have to choose between reading every message and just hoping for the best. they say yes to the phone, and they know that if something goes wrong, they will find out. not months later. while it can still be fixed.
the kid keeps their privacy. their friendships, crushes and inside jokes stay theirs. nobody reads along. but when an adult starts writing to them in a way no adult should, or the class chat turns on them, something notices. and the right person gets pulled in.
fifty years later the same kid’s grandma gets a call from a voice that sounds exactly like her grandson, asking for money. something notices that too.
every person has a personal digital safety layer. it sits across their whole digital life, understands what is happening, steps in when something is wrong and stays quiet the rest of the time.
and in a few years it will feel as strange to give a kid a phone without it as it feels today to let a kid ride a bike without a helmet.
that’s the world I want to build. that’s Helmit.
why I care
when I was young I was cyberbullied. and I never told my parents.
not because we had a bad relationship. we had a really good one. and this is not an accusation against them at all. I just thought the others were right. so I was ashamed and kept quiet, and because of that it went on much longer than it ever should have.
when they found out later they kept asking me: “why didn’t you come to us?”
I didn’t have an answer back then. today I think it is the wrong question. kids don’t come to their parents. expecting them to is not a strategy.
what is going on
- social media was one huge test on an entire generation. it turned out real bad
- my generation grew up with whatsapp, instagram & co. we know exactly how much bullying, harassment and creepy stuff happens there. from class chats to adults writing to children
- parents usually find out way too late. often only when the damage is already done
- the incentive structures at the platforms are completely off. Instagram could ship an update tomorrow that makes it practically impossible for pedophiles to write to children
- they don’t
- digital violence is just tolerated
if the platforms don’t take responsibility, someone else has to.
what everyone gets wrong
screen time
almost every parental control app answers the question “how long is my kid online?”
but if a child is only online for two hours a day, nothing about that makes those two hours safe. the danger is not the number of hours. it’s what happens inside the chats.
bans
the social media ban debate makes it look like we only found out this year that things go wrong for kids online. we have known for years. we discussed it, we regulated it. the DSA has been fully in force since 2024.
we don’t only have a regulation problem. we have a massive implementation problem.
every new measure should be measured by one simple question: when does it actually reach the kids? not in a press release. not in a strategy paper. in their everyday life. regulation that doesn’t arrive stays theory. and theory doesn’t protect a single child.
and bans have the risk of being a fake solution. kids get around them, the problems move to game chats and messengers, and political measures take so long that they are outdated by the time they arrive. look at how different the internet looked seven years ago.
surveillance
the other extreme: just read everything your kid writes. that destroys the relationship. and a kid who feels watched just moves somewhere you can’t see.
a product that goes around the child gets gone around by the child.
so in Helmit parents never read the inbox. they only see the conversation that actually crossed the line. everything else stays private. this isn’t about 1984. it’s more like an ai buddy that keeps them safe and is quiet the rest of the time.
and to be clear: Helmit does not replace parenting. it makes parenting in the digital world possible in the first place.
what we are actually building
every competitor builds a toolbox and hands it to the parents. screen time here, an app blocker there, good luck.
we are building the craftsman, not the toolbox.
Helmit sits across the kid’s whole digital life (phone, whatsapp, instagram, discord, games), understands what is going on and acts: an alert, a screen time rule, a blocked contact. parents only get pulled in when a human judgement is actually needed.
why the name
when a kid learns to ride a bike, nobody discusses whether they should wear a helmet. it’s not surveillance, it’s not overprotective. it’s just what you do. and the helmet doesn’t stop them from riding. it lets them ride more freely.
I want Helmit to be that for a kid’s first smartphone.
the rest of my brain
Helmit is what I’m working on. if you want to know who is building it, feel free to explore and click around :D