As Play Moments moves from research and early product development towards testing with more families, the technology behind the experience needs to grow with the ambition of the product itself. That means thinking not only about what parents see on screen, but about the infrastructure, security and technical decisions that sit behind it.
In April 2026, Play Moments began working with the UCL Centre for Digital Innovation (CDI) through its Impact Accelerator, gaining access to technical expertise from UCL and AWS to help the team review and strengthen the foundations of the platform.
The programme comes at an important stage in the development of Play Moments. Following extensive research with families and early-years professionals, the team is now building a more personalised experience designed to provide parents and carers with practical guidance that reflects their child's needs, interests and stage of development.
As that experience becomes more sophisticated, the technical requirements become more significant too. Personalisation, user accounts, data, activity recommendations and future growth all rely on technology that is secure, resilient and capable of scaling responsibly.
For the Play Moments team, joining the accelerator provides an opportunity to examine those foundations early rather than waiting until the platform has grown considerably before addressing them.
"We are building something that we hope can eventually support many thousands of families, so it is important that we make good technical decisions now rather than trying to retrofit them later. Parents need to be able to trust the technology behind the platform just as much as they trust the guidance they receive through it. The accelerator gives us an opportunity to work alongside specialists who can challenge our thinking and help us build those foundations properly."
Ioana Axinte, Co-founder of Play Moments
Throughout the programme, the Play Moments technical team will work with specialists across cloud architecture, security and infrastructure to review how the platform has been built and identify where improvements can be made.
The work will consider areas including resilience, security, data protection, monitoring, infrastructure design and the platform's ability to respond as usage grows. The team will also explore how to make the technology easier to operate and maintain as Play Moments develops beyond its initial product.
The collaboration is particularly valuable because Play Moments sits at the intersection of early-years support and technology. While the parent experience needs to remain simple, the systems supporting it must be capable of handling increasing levels of personalisation and data responsibly behind the scenes.
The accelerator therefore represents more than a technical review. It is part of a wider process of ensuring that Play Moments can move from an early-stage product towards a platform that is ready for real-world use with families and, over time, potential collaboration with early-years organisations and services.
Working with UCL CDI and AWS will also give the team the opportunity to test assumptions about its existing architecture, understand where risks may emerge as the platform grows and establish stronger engineering practices for the next stage of development.
For Play Moments, the timing is deliberate. The team wants the infrastructure behind the product to develop alongside the evidence, content and parent experience rather than treating technology as something that can be addressed separately later.
"Our ambition for Play Moments is significant, but scale only works if the foundations underneath it are strong. This programme is helping us make sure that the technology can grow responsibly alongside the families and organisations we hope to support."
Ioana Axinte, Co-founder of Play Moments
The Impact Accelerator will run through the summer of 2026, with the learning from the programme feeding directly into the next stage of Play Moments' technical development and preparations for future family pilots.
More information about Play Moments is available at playmoments.app.
