This is an interview with Carole Osborne (pictured), Founder and CEO at Aidos – the UK’s first and only AI safeguarding platform built solely to protect children’s identities in school photography.
Tell us about your background?
My career for the last thirty years has been in brand, working with organisations to help them communicate who they are and what they stand for. I founded Borne, a Norwich-based brand communications agency, and ran it for fifteen years. At its peak we grew to a team of 55 and around £6.5m turnover, working across sectors – from education and healthcare to retail and public sector. It was meaningful work, and I was proud of what we had built. But in the last few years, the market changed and, at speed. So much faster than my traditional agency model could follow. It was incredibly tough.
The honest answer is that I watched it happening and kept looking for a way through – from trying different structures to exploring different revenue streams. I was holding on, because people’s jobs depended on me finding a viable solution.
However, last year, I took the very difficult decision to stop rather than trade on, and Borne went into creditors’ voluntary liquidation. It was truly one of the hardest things I have ever done.
But what came out of it, what I could not have anticipated, was Aidos. It was through Borne’s work with schools that I first heard what was happening to children’s images online. That conversation changed everything.
Why did you set up Aidos?
Just under two years ago now, I was in a meeting with a school client while I was still running Borne. We were working together on their re-brand, when they mentioned that another school they knew of, had recently been held to ransom after their pupils’ school images had been scraped by criminals, turned into child sexual abuse material, and then threatened with the images to be released on the dark web.
I sat there and listened to what had happened to those children in absolute shock and horror. I am a mother of two teenage girls; my reaction had nothing to do with my professional background. It was much simpler than that and I thought: I never want this to happen to my daughters.
Straight after, I rang other headteachers within my professional network. Turns out, this wasn’t an isolated incident – it was an issue already sitting on risk registers across the sector, and yet nobody had an answer.
I went looking for something that protected children’s identities in published images and found nothing that did it properly, including at source-code level. So, I decided to build it.
I had spent thirty years helping organisations be seen, and I knew there and then that the next thing I built had to be so that children could not be seen.
What have been your biggest challenges and how have you overcome them?
Honestly? The hard part isn’t the technology, it’s asking people to act against a harm most of them haven’t experienced yet.
Safeguarding budgets are set against known risks, and AI image abuse only really entered the conversation eighteen months ago.
When you are creating a new category, there is nothing to measure yourself against – no benchmark, no comparable, no established buying process to slot into. You are asking people to spend money on a problem they haven’t yet been able to put a number on.
What has shifted it for us is fact and insight. We have commissioned new independent research UK headteachers, so the sector can see the scale of the problem for itself, rather than taking a supplier’s word for it. And, we have built authority. I’ve assembled an advisory bench with genuine standing, including Simon Bailey CBE QPM, the former National Policing Lead for Child Protection, which really does change the conversation.
What I have learned is to stop selling the product and start making the risk visible. For people to be bought into the service and the solution that Aidos offers, they need to truly understand the issue and the risks associated with not addressing it.
What have you learnt second time round as a founder?
Everything and nothing. Some things I wish I had known sooner; others I suspect you can only learn by doing them wrong first time round. Creating a new category needs facts and insights, and it needs trust and relationships. And, you cannot shortcut either. When there is no benchmark to measure yourself against, you learn to hold two things at once: moving fast and staying grounded in why you started. Letting go of one or the other is the easy mistake to make.
I have also had to recalibrate completely on timelines. Sales do come, but not at the pace a services business trains you to expect. I knew that going in to this, but – as often is the case – knowing it and living it are very different things.
The thing nobody tells you clearly enough is how different a product business is from a services business. In a services business, growth looks like more people; whilst in a product business, growth looks like more proof. I had to unlearn a lot of instincts I had spent building over the last few decades. And the hardest thing I have learned, and the one that still sits with me, is that I held on to Borne for too long.
I kept going because people’s livelihoods depended on me finding a way through, and I genuinely believed I would. That is not a bad reason to keep trying. But, hope and loyalty kept me in the room longer than the numbers warranted, and by the time I made the call, some of the options I might have had earlier were gone. I still think about that a lot. Knowing when to walk away is its own kind of courage, and it is something nobody really prepares you for.
What are your plans for the future?
The thing I keep coming back to is this: a village primary school with eighty children enrolled has exactly the same duty of care as a Trust with a thousand children across its schools. That shapes everything about how I have built Aidos – the pricing, the onboarding process, all of it. I am not trying to land big contracts, I am trying to reach as many children as possible, as quickly as I can.
In the short term that means early years and nursery settings are going to be primary focus – there are around 27,900 registered schools in England alone, all with statutory obligations around children’s images under the EYFS framework. It means working with groups and trusts, because when a decision is made at that level, every school in the group is protected at once. And it means following the relationships that are already opening up internationally – right now both Australia and the US are both in the picture.
In September, we will also be publishing a new report based on research carried out among UK headteachers to establish what schools are actually experiencing on the ground.
The honest ambition behind it all, is bigger than Aidos. I want digital image protection to sit alongside GDPR and online safety as something every school just does – not because a platform persuaded them to, but because the sector decided it was a non-negotiable. That is the conversation I want to be part of.
What are your thoughts on the current UK business environment?
Britain is genuinely world-class at building safeguarding and child-protection technology, however it is considerably less good at buying it quickly. I say that without bitterness – it is just the reality of operating in this space, and you have to go in with your eyes open.
The structural problem is a timings mismatch. Public sector and education procurement moves very slowly and, often, for good reasons. But, early-stage funding does not wait. You end up being asked to prove a market on a timeline that assumes everything moves faster than it does.
The most practical thing I can tell any founder building in this space is: assume you will need to raise more than once, plan for it from the beginning, and do not treat the second raise as evidence that something has gone wrong. It is just the shape of this particular road.
The other thing that keeps me up at night is regulation. The law is catching up on AI-generated abuse imagery, but catching up is not the same as being there. Schools have a duty of care to these children today – not when the legislation lands, not when the guidance is finalised, but today. That gap, between where the law is and where the harm already is, is the one Aidos was built to sit in.
How have you funded your business journey?
We raised £250,000 from private investors under SEIS – the Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme – alongside grants. SEIS is genuinely one of the most founder-friendly mechanisms available in the UK and I would encourage anyone building at early stage to explore it. The tax incentives for investors are significant, and it levels a playing field that otherwise tilts sharply away from first-time product founders who don’t have a track record in tech.
What advice would you give to aspiring business owners?
Start with a problem you would still care about in five years. Not a market opportunity, not a trend – a proper problem. Why? Because there will be moments when the only thing keeping you going is the fact that the problem genuinely matters to you. Market size does not get you through those moments, the caring really does.
I’d also get closer to the people with the problem, than you think you need to. Sit with them, listen to what actually worries them, and resist the urge to start building until you really understand it. I have seen too many founders fall in love with their solution before they have properly understood the problem. The product should follow the insight, not lead it.
If you are creating a category – and plenty of the most interesting companies are – accept that trust comes before revenue. You are not selling a product into an existing market. You are asking people to believe that a problem they may not have fully named yet is real, and that you are the right person to solve it. That takes time, and it takes proof. The sale is downstream of both.
And the last thing and I mean this genuinely: closing a business is brutal.
It is one of the hardest experiences I have had, but it is not a disqualification. I would not be building Aidos the way I am building it – the decisions I make, the mistakes I have already avoided – without everything that happened with Borne. The hard chapters are not separate from the story. They are the story.