Coneuron, a startup in stealth mode focusing on making kids’ virtual world a better place, announced today the build of a global dream team to tackle the challenges of the screenagers’ generation. After selling cybersecurity company Aorato to Microsoft for $200 million, Idan Plotnik, CEO of Coneuron, is turning his focus towards online interactions of youth.
Coneuron arms young people with the ability to sense peer intent and feedback of their own online behaviors and interactions. With the goal to empower young people, Coneuron enables them to increase social skills, confidence, and ability to digest potential criticism in a private way.
“After a successful exit with Aorato and a prosperous business at Microsoft, I knew my next endeavor would have to be one that could reach global impact. As a new father, my priorities and focus have now changed from wanting to stop hackers from gaining credentials to providing better understanding around how teens are being affected by negative online interactions,” said Idan Plotnik, CEO of Coneuron. “With our newly minted advisory team, I am confident that Coneuron is being set up to have an enormous impact.”
The early-stage company is hitting the ground running with the addition of major global technology players to its advisory board, including:
- Prof. Gil David, a global expert in the field of AI and Deep Learning, led for seven years R&D teams in the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office. In his postdoc in Applied Mathematics at Yale University, Gil developed algorithms for learning user behavior. Gil was a member of the Aorato Advisory Board, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2014.
- Prof. Ely Porat served for 9 years in the 8200-intelligence unit at the IDF. At the age of 21 he received his doctorate, and he was only 27-year-old when he became a professor. In addition he worked for Google and Oracle. Ely specializes in theory of algorithms and has a lot of industry experience in ML in Big Data environments.
- Yu-Kai Chou is one of the earliest pioneers and a world expert in Gamification. He was awarded with the “Gamification of the Year” title in 2014, 2015 and 2017. Yu-Kai is a lecturer and consultant in organizations such as Google, Tesla, Stanford University, LEGO and eBay.
- Dr. Eyal Doron is a researcher, lecturer and developer of creative thinking for youth groups and readiness for the 21st century. He is the head of the Psychology and Humanities Division at the New School of Psychology in the Interdisciplinary Center in Israel.
“Joining Coneuron is a special project, as we get to merge our backgrounds in the world of cybersecurity behavioral analytics, gamification, big data and creative thinking to employ some of the very same machine learning and AI techniques to the cyberbullying dilemma,” said Prof. Gil David. “Idan’s vision and the team’s ability to execute, will surely create another great venture for all of us.”
The company develops a mobile application and platform based on a unique patent-pending technology that applies artificial intelligence on social media interactions and combines the expression of youth feelings regarding individuals’ activities in social networks.
In November 2017, Coneuron announced that CEO Idan Plotnik had invested $4M pre-seed.
