How we started
The journey so far…
Our story started in mid 2020 in a small apartment in Central London. The founding team gathered together for Sunday lunch, just after the UK lifted lockdown restrictions. During lunch, the children were playing and the adults were doing what adults do.
Having watched a TV show with the kids for a few minutes, Dean turned to rest of the soon to be founding team and said “Why aren’t there more black kids on these shows?”.
Silence… then no one responded. A few moments passed and Dean said “Surely we can do this?”. Silence again… Then Dean grabbed his laptop, Kofi was all for it “Yeah, its feasible to generate some show concepts and pilots quite quickly”.
Ben said he was in as long as we we able to go beyond the current model of how these VOD platforms run and Jordan said he’d handle the UX/UI.
and so after:
• Two weeks we registered Yyoma (Jul)
• Four weeks (Aug) we released our first animated episode called Kwame ‘s Kente Coat
• Six weeks (Sept) we started to license content from around the world
• Eight weeks (Oct) we launched our proof of concent on Web
• Ten weeks (Nov) that we launched our alpha iOS and Android apps
and in December we started to speak to our investors and key partners securing a deal that has enabled us to build state of the art web, mobile and tablet apps.
By January 2021, authors started to see Yyoma as a vehicle to reach more children and we agreed to feature their content in our shows and content producers loved what we were doing and we managed to secure a licencing deal with Ubongo Kids. With momentum building, we did what any group of founders on a mission would do; we doubled down and started to reach out to more content producers in order to fulfil our mission to break down racial, gender based and disability biases from the foundation, whilst building self esteem in kids.
Now you know our story, click here to Meet the team