Gabb Wireless
Aligned built the safety infrastructure behind Gabb Messenger from the ground up — a multi-layer AI system now scanning 170+ million messages a month for nearly 200,000 kids, flagging harmful content, notifying parents, and giving Gabb the ability to act before damage is done.
The challenge wasn't just technical. Gabb had a mission and a market, but not the engineering expertise to build what that mission required. For five years, Aligned has filled that gap entirely, embedding mature product and engineering talent into an organization that had never built software at this level of complexity. Throughout this time, the team has grown to 10 who actively manage and grow the system which underpins every safe interaction on every Gabb device.
Gabb's mission is to give kids a phone that keeps them safe, with no internet, social media or games. But when the first Gabb Phone launched, it had one gap — kids could text anyone about anything or be added to group conversations with anyone, with no parental visibility and no content filtration. Unrestricted digital communication is one of the primary vectors for grooming, explicit content, bullying, and self-harm. For a company whose entire value proposition is child safety, that gap was critical.
- Business ModelB2C
- IndustryChild safety, consumer tech
- StageGrowth Stage
- DeliverablesSafety infrastructure
Expertise where there was none
Gabb had a vision for keeping kids safe. Aligned built the technical foundation to make it real.
When Messenger was born, Gabb lacked technical expertise to design and ship safety-critical software at scale. They had a compelling idea and a customer base that needed it badly. Aligned brought the architectural thinking, the engineering rigor, and the product judgment to translate that idea into a scalable system — one that would have to work reliably for hundreds of thousands of families, across multiple device types, in real time.
That foundation became Gabb's most defensible product asset. The team at Aligned designed it, owned it, and continued to evolve it.
Three layers, calibrated response
Smart filtration handles multimedia with the right response.
The filtration system operates across text messages, images, and live video simultaneously — and is deliberately designed to respond in proportion to risk. Text is scanned on-device for harmful words and emojis, then routed through a toxicity ML model, and if there's a hit, then reclassified by a cloud-based LLM model into 13 harm categories: grooming, child exploitation, self-harm, weapons, and more — with low, medium, and high severity ratings. A bullying message alerts a parent. An explicit image gets blocked and the parent is notified immediately.
Live video calls are monitored and classified in real time. If nudity is detected, the call terminates instantly. Images maintain a false-negative rate of just 1.54%, meaning the system catches the vast majority of harmful visual content before it reaches a child.
Designing for signal, not noise
~80% reduction in false-positive link notifications, so when parents get an alert, they pay attention.
A safety system that cries wolf becomes one parents learn to ignore. Early versions flagged every URL a child received, regardless of whether it was YouTube or an actual threat. Aligned redesigned the detection logic from first principles: a curated safe-domain list of ~117 known harmless sites suppresses benign notifications, while a continuously updated blocklist of ~71,000 known adult content domains ensures dangerous links are always caught — even when the AI misses them. The result is an ~80% reduction in link-related false-positive notifications. Parents see fewer alerts, and the ones they see are relevant.
Every parent, every flag
A notification architecture built for the parent who isn't watching.
Aligned rebuilt how Gabb communicates with parents by replacing a throttled, app-dependent system that silently dropped notifications with a dual-channel architecture to reach every parent regardless of app usage. Flagged video calls trigger an immediate transactional email. All other flagged content consolidates into a daily digest grouped by risk level: high, medium, and low. This means that every parent is notified at the right time and there are no gaps for parents who deleted the app six months ago. Families rely on this system to stay informed about what's happening in their child's digital world.
Ownership that compounds
The team that built it is still evolving it and the system gets smarter with every deployment.
Most agencies hand off and move on. Aligned has owned Gabb Messenger since its inception, which means the team with the deepest architectural context is the same team improving it. That continuity compounds: when Gabb needed to extend safety to video calling, Aligned built it. When they needed to expand to Gabb Watch, Aligned built it. When the system came under legal scrutiny over notification reliability, Aligned was already inside — redesigning the architecture and shipping the fix with full context, not starting from scratch. The system now processes over 170 million messages a month.
“The Aligned team is truly exceptional, embodying a collaborative spirit that makes working with the team an inspiring experience. Their commitment to excellence, coupled with a well-honed efficiency and innovation, means they're both really fast and exceed expectations. Jonatan and his team are the best of the best.”
People-first Development
We don't just align to your mission, we amplify your people.
Partnering with Aligned means access to experts invested in upleveling your team. As you build and scale, your talent grows with you — we mentor junior developers to increase ownership, accelerate growth, and deepen technical expertise.
