London-based Orbiri has raised £320,000 in an oversubscribed angel round with 14 individual investors, following an initial £45,000 in seed funding. The company is preparing to launch a community-wide solution that aligns children, parents, and schools around shared digital limits (shifting peer pressure from a barrier to a support) instead of relying on parents to police screen time individually or enforce blanket smartphone bans.
Orbiri provides a community-powered platform with preset, considered screen-time boundaries for children. Its collective-action approach aligns children, parents, and schools around shared boundaries to eliminate daily device battles and protect the conditions necessary for healthy childhood development. Rather than leaving schools and families to act alone, it enables coordinated limits within a single framework, aiming to make healthy digital habits the norm.
Amid growing concern about children’s unrestricted smartphone use, with schools in England adopting phone bans and ministers considering Australia-style limits on under-16s’ social media, Orbiri contends that durable progress depends on bottom-up community coordination rather than top-down restrictions.
Set to roll out next year, Orbiri will complete product development, secure compliance certifications, and run trials with early-adopter schools while expanding its core and product teams.
The goal is to demonstrate that shared community boundaries can replace daily device conflicts with a more natural shift toward healthier technology use, addressing shortcomings of school bans and individual parental controls.
The funding will support upcoming trial phases ahead of a broader launch, aligning with a growing view that approaches such as school phone bans and individual parental controls are insufficient and difficult to implement at scale.
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