Tim Estes

Founder, Angel Q · Chair, Alliance for a Better Future

Tim Estes is the founder of Angel Q, an AI product built for children, and the chair of the Alliance for a Better Future, a pro family group focused on human dignity and technology. He has spent about 25 years in artificial intelligence. He started his first company at 20 years old, then built systems for the defense and intelligence community and for Wall Street compliance, work that put him inside the hardest problems in the field long before the current generative wave. At the nonprofit Thorn, AI he helped build has been credited with identifying roughly 12,000 trafficked children in the United States.

His path to building for kids started with a loss. After a 10-year-old named Nyla Anderson died following a viral online challenge that an algorithm served to her, Tim decided the right response was not only to warn parents away from technology, but to build something a child could actually use safely. Angel Q is the result, an AI tool for kids that Tim describes as a perplexity for kids. It generates age-appropriate answers on the fly, uses playful personas like a sportscaster and a French chef, and runs every question through a three gate system that decides whether to answer, soften, or defer, and notifies the parent. It is subscription based, with no ads and no resale of children's data.

Tim's message to parents is not fear, it is literacy. You do not have to be at war with technology, but you do have to understand the business model behind everything your child touches. Keep technology in the open, never in private. And know that innovation and protecting kids are not in conflict, because you can build for both at the same time.