-- Gabriel Sabadin, founder and chief executive of Tuteliq, has won a 2026 Entrepreneur Award for building detection software that flags online harm against children while it is happening. The company sells a child safety API that reads text, voice, image, and video across 27 languages, scoring for grooming, coercive control, exploitation, bullying, fraud, and radicalization as a conversation unfolds.
Tuteliq was founded in Sweden in 2024 and sells to the platforms where children spend time online, including gaming platforms, social networks, messaging apps and educational tools.
Why The Win Matters
Most moderation systems classify one message at a time and act after harmful material has already been shared. Tuteliq scores conversations as they develop, tracking shifts in power, trust-building sequences, and escalation patterns that single-message classifiers tend to miss. Sabadin, a computer scientist with a doctorate and more than 25 years in software engineering and machine learning, is the named inventor on the patent-pending pipeline behind it. The judges pointed to the decision to build the detection science alongside a criminologist rather than treat the problem as generic classification.
"The difference is that authentication protects your system. Child safety protects your users," Sabadin wrote in a post for developers.
Tuteliq's chief scientific officer, Dr. Nicola Harding, is a criminologist whose research focuses on child exploitation and coercive control. Its senior advisor, Professor Sarah Kingston of the University of Central Lancashire, has given expert evidence to UK parliamentary committees.
Market Context
Figures published by the Internet Watch Foundation in October show analysts assessed 6,310 AI-generated images meeting the legal definition of child sexual abuse in the first six months of 2026, against 4,512 across all of 2025, a 40 percent rise in half the time. Girls appeared in 98 percent of the first-half images, and children aged seven to 13 accounted for 79 percent of them, up from 70 percent a year earlier. Regulation has moved in parallel, with the EU Digital Services Act, the UK Online Safety Act, and the Australian Online Safety Act placing duties on platforms that serve young users.
The Judges' Final Words
"The panel looked for a defined problem and a response that can be checked," Alexandra Dalton said. "This entry built its detection science with a criminologist, focused on how harm develops across a conversation rather than in a single message, and kept its technical claims specific enough to test. In a category where good intentions are common, that is the harder path."
About the Entrepreneur Awards: The Entrepreneur Awards is a recognition program for individual business founders. Sabadin's award is listed at entrepreneurawards.co/winners/gabriel-sabadin.
About the company: Entrepreneur Awards, for the person who built it. An independent award for founders.
Contact Info:
Name: Harry Neto
Email: Send Email
Organization: Entrepreneur Awards
Website: https://www.entrepreneurawards.co/
Release ID: 89206097
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