When Play Moments joined the UCL Centre for Digital Innovation Impact Accelerator earlier this year, the goal was not to add more features to the product. It was to look underneath them.
As Play Moments prepares to support more families, the team wanted to make sure that the technical foundation behind the platform could grow safely and reliably alongside the product. Over the course of the programme, the Play Moments technical team worked with specialists from UCL and AWS to review the platform's cloud architecture, identify potential risks and strengthen several of the systems that will support its next stage of growth.
The work resulted in improvements across infrastructure resilience, security, monitoring, backups and operational readiness, giving the team a much stronger technical foundation as it moves towards wider testing with families.
One important area of focus was resilience. Early-stage technology products often begin with relatively simple infrastructure, which is appropriate while they are being developed and tested. As usage grows, however, individual points of failure can create greater risks. Through the accelerator, the team reviewed the architecture and introduced greater redundancy across the infrastructure, helping reduce the risk that a single technical issue could affect the wider service.
The team also strengthened backup and recovery processes and introduced improved monitoring and alerts. These changes mean that potential problems can be identified more quickly and that the platform is better prepared to recover if something does go wrong.
Security formed another significant part of the programme. Because Play Moments is developing technology for families with young children, the team has taken a deliberately cautious approach to the way the platform handles infrastructure and data. Working with security specialists through the accelerator provided an opportunity to review existing decisions, strengthen controls and identify areas where additional safeguards were needed as the platform grows.
The programme also helped Play Moments improve its approach to cloud cost monitoring. For an early-stage company, building scalable technology is not simply about creating infrastructure capable of handling more users; it is also about ensuring that growth remains financially sustainable. Greater visibility of infrastructure usage and costs gives the team a stronger basis for making technical decisions as the number of families using the platform increases.
Alongside these changes, the team worked through a broader review of the platform against established cloud architecture principles, examining areas including security, reliability, operational effectiveness and cost.
"Going into the programme, we knew that we had built a strong starting point, but we also knew that building for hundreds or thousands of families requires a different level of thinking. The accelerator gave our team the space and specialist support to examine the parts of the product that families will never see but that are fundamental to whether they can trust and rely on the service."
Ioana Axinte, Co-founder of Play Moments
The collaboration also allowed Play Moments' technical team to work directly with specialists across cloud architecture and security. Those conversations provided not only recommendations for immediate improvements but a stronger framework for how the team thinks about technical decisions as the company develops.
By the end of the programme, several potential single points of failure had been addressed, resilience had been strengthened across the infrastructure, backup and alerting systems had been improved, security had been further hardened and the team had greater visibility over the operation and cost of its cloud environment.
For families, these changes should largely be invisible. That is precisely the point. Parents using Play Moments should be able to focus on the guidance and activities designed to support their child without having to think about the technology operating behind them.
For the company, however, the work represents an important step in moving from an early-stage application towards technology designed with future growth in mind.
The accelerator has also reinforced a principle that has shaped Play Moments throughout its development: innovation is not only about what a product can do. It is also about whether the systems behind it are responsible, resilient and capable of supporting people when they come to rely on them.
As Play Moments moves into the next stage of its development, the technical foundations strengthened through the UCL Centre for Digital Innovation Impact Accelerator will support continued product development, family testing and future pilots.
"The biggest outcome for us is confidence in the foundations we are building on. There will always be more to improve as we grow, but we now have a stronger architecture, stronger engineering practices and a much clearer understanding of what responsible scale needs to look like for Play Moments."
Ioana Axinte, Co-founder of Play Moments
The programme concludes an important chapter in Play Moments' technical development, but its impact will continue through the way the team builds, tests and scales the platform in the years ahead.
More information about Play Moments is available at playmoments.app.
