After winning both an App Store award for cultural impact and an Apple Design Award for the creative kid's app maker Pok Pok, which focuses on developing play-based learning experiences for the preschool set, the company is now ready to take its reach a notch higher by bringing its app and a new set of STEM-based activities to families with both iOS and Android devices, thanks to its latest funding.

The Pok Pok Playroom app currently provides 17 play experiences that will be best described as digital toys, as these are not games but rather ways of playing. Because of this, the app provides "toys" responding to touch, drawing tools, toys for interacting with shapes, dress-up toys, dinosaur toys, and many more.

Hailing from a studio born inside Snowman-award-winning iOS game creators like Alto's Adventure, Alto's Odyssey, Skate City, among others-the idea of Pok Pok came from a broader company culture of tinkering.

Mathijs Demaeght, VP of design at Pok Pok, and Esther Huybreghts, now chief creative officer, were already employees of Snowman who were looking for an app to entertain their young son James when he was still in his toddler age. However, the co-founders didn't find much they could like. They were looking for something of that playful but not so technical and not gamified kind. They prototyped a product, presented it to Snowman co-founder and creative director Ryan Cash, who saw the potential, and his sister, Melissa Cash-well, not a Disney expert. Her background was in developing products for babies and toddlers at Disney. She joined and is now the CEO of the Pok Pok spinout.

Founded just this May, Pok Pok has added new learning experiences to the app since its inception, also raised a $3m seed round and reached six figures in terms of monthly recurring revenue. The business had 5x in growth within the past year, with the subscriber base 9x - though the startup isn't ready to share hard numbers yet. The app itself has more than a million downloads.

It's clear growth at the startup caught the attention of investors enough to secure a $6 million Series A round led by Adjacent's Nico Wittenborn, who has also invested in other subscription plays including Oura, Calm, Clue, and Blinkist. The round was participated by Konvoy Ventures, Metalab Ventures, Banana Capital among many others, in which include both angel and institutional investors, such as Instacart's Brandon Leonardo.

Happy to have closed an over-subscribed round, the team realized that they hadn't had any women on their cap table, which felt uneasy to them because the company builds products for families led by women.

"That just didn't sit right," said CEO Melissa Cash. "So we decided to make some allocation changes. We set aside some cash from the round. We did a first close because we didn't want to hold up everything, but we took cash out and did a second close, which actually took us longer to raise than the first close because it was very tough to find female investors who participate at Series A and beyond."

The team found most women-led VCs to be pre-seed or seed or somehow connected with funds but not the decision-makers and check writers.

That nuance was quite important to us. And then we would find lots of great angel investors, but they didn't have the capital or the wealth, frankly, to be able to invest in a Series A because there's just a minimum check size. So it was really eye-opening," she said. "We thought if there's any company that can get female backing, it's Pok Pok."

These challenges took them longer to close the second close of the round, and investors include Michelle Kennedy from Peanut.

One of the new investors turned out to be fractional CFO to Pok Pok Julie McGill, who is also an LP in several bigger venture funds. She is no exception to Pok Pok's management team, who were frustrated by the company's struggle to add women to the cap table. McGill ended up starting a brand-new fund, Julie Change Fund, just to invest in Pok Pok. The fund will now focus on bringing in wealthy individual women investing at the Series A stage and beyond.

Pok Pok is the spark that's igniting a fund I have been contemplating for years; this fund is my promise to crush barriers that stand in the way of women who seek access, drive and contribute to capital," McGill said in a statement. "We are excited to be partnering with Pok Pok, a company which has mastered capital-efficient growth from two truly phenomenal female leaders.".

The additional new funds will be used by Pok Pok to include more conventional learning activities to compete with the more playful ones that parents have requested in the app. The activities will still be targeting preschoolers but will give recognition to the younger and older users who continue to be part of its very own particular universe of design.

That later fall-ear permits the company to also answer demand for Android. Because of more accessible price points, many families have Android tablets for their kids, said Cash.

"We want to be able to make Pok Pok available to everybody," she said, going on to explain that the wait list has been growing for quite some time. "We've got thousands of users, all of whom are just waiting for it.".