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A few months ago, I wrote about how Lovevery built a $200M / year toy empire by studying how kids actually develop and working backward to build the best products for kids.
Stickerbox is running the same playbook after raising $7M from the same investor who backed Lovevery. This time with AI.
It all starts with a question nobody in AI hardware is asking.
Every major tech wave gets built for adults first. Kids inherit it later. Social media wasn’t built for kids. Kids just ended up using it. We all know how that’s going. AI is doing the exact same thing right now with those chatbot plushies and talking teddy bears. It’s an adult ChatGPT crammed inside a stuffed animal.
Two repeat founders, Arun Gupta (sold Grailed to GOAT in 2022) and Bob Whitney (ex-Anthropic and Grailed), looked at all this and asked:
What if AI were designed for kids from scratch?
Their answer was a $99 red cube that prints stickers.
Genesis
On a rainy Saturday, Bob’s 3-year-old son ran up and asked for a coloring page of a dog eating ice cream.
Bob fired up ChatGPT, made the image, dug a dusty old printer out from under the bed, and handed the page to his kid.
Sixty seconds later, his son came back.
"I want a lizard riding a skateboard."
Bob printed it. This time he noticed something. His son wasn't running off to color. He kept coming back with more requests.
"I just saw this look on his face of pure magic. It was the moment his imagination became something he could hold."
Bob went full mad scientist, hacking together a prototype with Raspberry Pi, a cardboard box, two arcade buttons and an off-the-shelf printer.
It wasn’t pretty, but the core idea worked. You talk to a box, and it prints a sticker.
He needed a partner to turn it into a real company. He thought of Arun, his former CEO at Grailed. Coincidentally, Arun also texted him that same week. Arun had just left Grailed and was figuring out what to do next.
As soon as Arun saw the Raspberry Pi prototype, he was in.
Product journey
1/ Product philosophy
There are 30+ chatbot plushies on the market right now. Talking bears, talking dinosaurs, AI best friends. They all do the same thing: wrapping ChatGPT in fur.
One core thesis behind Stickerbox is that kids don’t need chatbots.
Kids have friends. They have parents, siblings, and classmates. They're surrounded by people to talk to. Arun and Bob believe that kids don't actually need an AI companion. What they do need is a way to take the wild ideas bouncing around their heads (skateboarding lizards, pizza-eating dragons, bunny astronauts) and make them real.
They intentionally designed Stickerbox as a creative tool that doesn’t talk back.
It doesn’t have any engagement loop. Instead of optimizing for minutes-on-device, they define their success by the number of creative outputs kids generate: the comic books, the birthday cards, the valentines, the bedroom walls covered in weird creatures.
"The AI disappears behind the magic. The screen is not the hero. The AI is not the hero. It's the kid's idea and the sticker, that's the hero."
The device is designed to be forgotten. That's the whole point.
2/ Product challenges
Both Arun and Bob came from a software background. Going from a Raspberry Pi in a cardboard box to a real product on shelves proved to be real challenge.
The core mechanic of the product is simple (press button -> say things -> get sticker), but everything around it wasn’t as straightforward.
The BPA crisis. Stickerbox uses thermal paper instead of inks, and most thermal paper contains BPA or BPS compounds. This is a huge issue, because kids might put it in their mouth. They burned 4-6 weeks cycling through paper suppliers, testing and re-testing, trying to find one that was actually BPA/BPS-free.
The single-button problem. The early prototype had two arcade buttons and they spent a lot of time reducing that interaction to just one button. It sounds trivial but getting a hardware interaction down to a single button that a 3-year-old can use while still being satisfying for an 11-year-old turned out to be a difficult design challenge. Bob described it as "sculpting": keep shaving things away, resist the urge to add features, until only the essential thing remains.
COPPA and kidSAFE certification. There was also a lot of thinking going into making the product compliant and safe. To ensure privacy, the device only listens when you hold the button down. Voice data gets processed and immediately discarded. Content moderation filters block inappropriate prompts before anything generates. If a kid does try to prompt something weird, it just prints a random sticker instead.
The growth story
1/ From beta testing to the first viral moment
Before launch, Arun and Bob ran structured play testing sessions through their personal networks. They'd bring in families who had no idea what they were about to test, watch kids interact with the device, and collect feedback. That tight loop allowed them to sculpt the product down to its simplest form and nail the surprise-and-delight moment.
That moment is what made Stickerbox a content machine.
When a kid uses it, there's a natural three-act structure: talk to the box, the box thinks, sticker prints out. That's a 15-second video with a built-in reveal. Every use is a potential TikTok.
An AI editor at tom’s guide named Amanda Caswell, roughly 50 followers at the time, posted a video of her kids using Stickerbox. That one video got millions of views and drove the first 1,000+ waitlist signups.
2/ TikTok and press frenzy
After the launch in November 2025, the #stickerbox tag on TikTok exploded. Hundreds of videos. Millions of views. Mostly random moms posting everyday content that accidentally blows up. Once a video goes viral, the creator keeps posting Stickerbox content because it keeps getting them views.
Around the same time, the press also piled on. TechCrunch did the hands-on review. New Atlas, TechRadar, Product Hunt. Organic communities popped up too. Reddit, parent Facebook groups, local parenting message boards.
3/ Current traction
Their TikTok virality and press coverage helped them sell out their entire year’s inventory in just two weeks. Kids also created over 1 million stickers in the first month.
The company raised $7M from Maveron, Serena Ventures (Serena Williams), and the Allen Institute's AI2 incubator.
4/ Future growth levers
As Bob and Arun ponder the next phase of growth, they plan on leaning on the use cases they are seeing to drive the next wave of growth. Kids are making comic books, greeting cards, family trees, storybook illustrations, characters for games. Homeschoolers adopted it out of nowhere. There are opportunities to launch new products around those emerging use cases and also tell their stories in more interesting ways.
5 lessons for founders
1/ "What if X were built for [target audience] from the ground up?" Stickerbox redesigned AI for kids from zero, instead of putting ChatGPT in a plushie. Try this framing next time you're adapting an existing product for a new market.
2/ Design for what happens after the interaction. Stickerbox measures success by what kids create, not time on device. If your success metric is attention captured rather than value created, you might be building the wrong thing.
3/ Build products that are inherently content machines. The Stickerbox demo IS a TikTok: three acts, prompt, wait, reveal. A random person with 50 followers filmed it and it went viral. Are there ways you can turn your product into a content machine too?
4/ Physical outputs can feel more emotional. Holding something you imagined creates an emotional connection that pixels on a screen never will. If your product can bridge digital and physical, lean hard into the tangible.
5/ Constraint is magic. Stickerbox team tries to do one thing really well: turn what a kid imagines into something they can hold. The consumer AI hardware graveyard is full of products that tried to do everything (RIP Rabbit R1, RIP Humane Pin). That constraint made the product more delightful.
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See you next Tuesday!
Leo
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