Our Story
The internet was not designed with children in mind. Every day, kids aged 8 to 15 are navigating grooming attempts, manipulation, peer pressure, and commercial exploitation with no real preparation and parents who are largely left guessing.
WizeGen is a two-sided learning platform built to change that. It trains children to recognise and handle real online threats through scenario-based learning, and guides parents alongside with the context and tools to support them. Built for a generation that is growing up online faster than anyone prepared them for.
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 recognise predators, manipulation, and cyberbullying, before it reaches them. That mission became WizeGen.
Who we are
Misagh Akhondzad
Co-founder
A couple of decades in bringing technology solutions to the market. Now focused on bringing kids digital resilience to families.
Reza Shokrzad
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.
Want to help us build the future of digital safety?
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