Some founders build companies, John Kobs builds chapters. After 14 years turning Apartment List from a back of the napkin idea into a platform that powered roughly 3% of U.S. rental moves, raised...
Some founders build companies, John Kobs builds chapters. After 14 years turning Apartment List from a back of the napkin idea into a platform that powered roughly 3% of U.S. rental moves, raised $162M, hit profitability in 2020, and crossed a $600M valuation, John Kobs could have taken a victory lap and called it a career, but instead John Kobs went home, looked at his kids, and decided screen time deserved better writers.
Enter Giant. Giant Labs, Inc., publicly launched in May 2025, just secured $8M in Seed funding led by Matrix, Decasonic, and Griffin Gaming Partners, with Perceptive Ventures, Flex Capital, Arbitrum Gaming Ventures, Unpopular Ventures, and LightShed Ventures joining the table, and Dana Stalder, who backed John Kobs back in the Apartment List Series A days, runs it back here alongside Paul Hsu, Pierre-Edouard Planche, Rick Johanson, Camilo Acosta, Chris Hubbell, Peter Livingston, Richard Greenfield and crew, which tells you this is conviction capital, not tourist capital.
Giant is an AI powered interactive storytelling platform for kids ages 3–8, built across 3 clean lanes where Watch lets children become cartoon characters starring in personalized animated shows shaped by their name, voice, and interests, Talk opens real time conversations with AI characters that actually remember prior interactions, and Create hands young minds the pen so they can design episodes and worlds that evolve with them.
Since launch, children have logged more than 1,000,000 minutes in conversation with AI characters and viewed over 200,000 personalized episodes, and that kind of repeat engagement is not a vanity metric but a signal, the quiet whisper of product market fit before it starts speaking in full sentences.
Safety is not a footnote but a foundation, with no ads, no tracking, no data collection, built with input from child development experts, certified safe for young users, and photo uploads deleted and never stored, which in a world monetizing attention means Giant is inventing tomorrow’s nostalgia without selling today’s childhood. There is poetry in that tagline, Inventing Tomorrow’s Nostalgia, because Giant is not chasing trends but planting memories that compound over time.
John Kobs, CEO, Founder and Chairman, knows marketplaces, scale, and timing, Ben Scott, CFO, brings 20+ years of early stage finance discipline from Seed through Series B, and strategy is led by David Silverman, with the entity filed in Delaware, California registration dated February 24, 2025, headquartered on Geary Boulevard in San Francisco, built deliberately with no rush and no noise.
Matrix understands consumer platforms, Decasonic understands digital economies, Griffin Gaming Partners lives and breathes interactive worlds with $1.5B under management, and when gaming, AI, and family safe design intersect you do not get another app but a new category sitting quietly in your living room.
For families tired of passive scroll and autoplay hypnosis, Giant offers something radical in its simplicity, participation, and for builders watching from the sidelines there is a lesson stitched into this round, start with a real problem, make it personal, stack the right capital, measure what matters, protect your users, and let the minutes compound, because $8M is the headline while 1,000,000 minutes of imagination is the story, and if this is Seed, the forest is going to be interesting.