It started with something we couldn't look away from.
Reza spent years building AI-powered games, not just for gameplay, but for connection. Every game he built was designed around one idea: people with a shared purpose form deeper bonds than strangers on a generic feed. It worked. One game crossed 1.5 million users. The social layer was the reason.
But running a platform with that many teenagers means you start seeing what actually happens to them online. Manipulation. Grooming. Private images shared without consent. Kids in crisis with no idea what to do or who to tell.
Reza had spent years enabling connection between young people online. He had never stopped to ask: are they equipped for what that actually means?
They weren't. And most still aren't.
Reza called Misagh, a close colleague and father of a 6-year-old. He asked him one question: “Do you have a plan for when your son gets on social media?”
Misagh went quiet. Not because he didn't care, he cared deeply. He just had no answer. No plan. Nothing but worry.
That conversation made one thing clear: parents are anxious, kids are unprotected, and nobody has a real solution.
What began as innovation turned into a silent war for human attention. Every app, every feed, every notification became an exercise in behavioral psychology, tuned not for wisdom, but for stickiness.
What once promised connection began breeding comparison.
What was meant to inform started to inflame.
And teenagers, still forming their identity, still learning what's real, are navigating all of it completely blind.
Jonathan Haidt
As he warns in The Anxious Generation, we are witnessing the first digitally native generations growing up in a world where screens shape identity before experience can. Their emotional worlds are built inside algorithms that reward outrage and insecurity.
Alison Gopnik
The Gardener and the Carpenter
Children need a safe garden to explore and take risks, not a carpenter hovering over them. We've overprotected their bodies in the real world, and abandoned them entirely in the digital one.
So Reza and Misagh stopped asking "should we give them a phone?" and started asking a better question:
"How do we prepare them before we do?"
The Carpenter monitors. The Gardener prepares.
Not with bans. Not with parental controls. But by actually teaching kids to recognize predators, manipulation, and cyberbullying, before it reaches them. That mission became Wizegen.
Building digital safety for the next generation.
Co-founder
A couple of decades in bringing technology solutions to the market. Now focused on bringing online safety to families.
Co-founder
Four years building AI-powered games with over 1.5 million users. Now using that knowledge of how young people connect online, to protect them.
Senior Research Designer
PhD in Strategy, specializing in data-driven research. Designs our research process to ensure everything we build is grounded in evidence.
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Wizegen