Giant Raises $8M to Turn Kids From Viewers Into Storytellers

Startup Giant has raised $8 million to build generative AI entertainment that lets children create characters and shape stories instead of swiping through feeds.

The company was co-founded by John Koshland, who previously founded Apartment List, the rental platform that now accounts for 3% of U.S. rental moves. His co-founder is David Silverman. The idea came, he writes, on a flight from San Francisco to Cleveland a couple of years ago, when he handed his two-year-old daughter an iPad loaded with a popular kids cartoon on Netflix.

The problem was pace. Fast cuts, constant scene changes, another burst of action before the last one settled. "I wanted her to have room to wonder what might happen next, and a chance to decide," he writes in Fortune.

What problem does Giant target?

Koshland's argument rests on two fronts: attention and agency. YouTube Shorts, he argues, trains children to swipe the moment something loses their attention. "We worry about our children's ability to concentrate, then give them feeds that offer an escape from every moment of boredom," he writes.

The numbers behind that worry come from a 2025 Common Sense Media report:

• 58% of American 4-year-olds have their own tablet
• That rises to 68% among 8-year-olds
• Children ages 5 to 8 average nearly three and a half hours of screen time a day

"What happens during those hours deserves as much scrutiny as how many hours we allow," Koshland writes.

How does the product work?

Giant's model updates the Choose Your Own Adventure books of the 1980s, the format Koshald grew up with alongside Sesame Street and Mister Rogers reruns. Generative AI pushes the concept further: children invent a character, introduce an idea, or steer the adventure somewhere its creators never anticipated.

"Children shouldn't have to be passive consumers of content, they should be active creators of it," he writes. In Koshland's framing, the product is a show or movie that unfolds in real time, driven by the child's imagination rather than a recommendation algorithm.

He also makes a competitive case. "Rejecting AI in entertainment hands another advantage to the giants that can already afford to make it," he writes. "For a startup, AI makes it possible to compete."

What about safety and advertising?

Koshland says he approaches the business "as a father first." Giant is COPPA certified, but he treats certification as a floor, not the whole answer. The company's safety architecture includes:

• Systems that flag unsuitable content
• Parent visibility into everything children create
• Careful review of what characters say, generate, and how they respond to a child
• No advertising

"Parents deserve that visibility without an advertiser competing for their child's attention," he writes.

What's the so-what?

Giant is betting that the next battleground in kids' media is not content volume but creative control — shifting a child's role from watching someone else's story to building her own. Koshland still sets screen-time limits at home. Within those limits, he writes, "I want her imagination and curiosity to have somewhere to go" — a dragon from her sketchbook, a journey to the moon, a story that changes because she has an idea.