The 50 Most Influential Women in UK Tech 2017

Sophie Deen is the founder and CEO of social enterprise Bright Little Labs, a children’s education company that makes educationally valuable, gender-neutral and ethically sourced toys and materials.

Bright Little Labs is the creator of Detective Dot who is a developer by day, a detective by night, and the heroine of the organisation’s stories.

Voted Computer Weekly’s Rising Star and BIMA’s Top 100 2016 for her work to bring gender equality to kids media, Deen is a former lawyer, techie and school counsellor.

She worked at Code Club, alongside Google and the Department for Education, to help introduce the coding curriculum, before setting up Bright Little Labs in 2015, because – “In kids’ cartoons, 0% of princesses are engineers, under 3% of characters are black, and Batman doesn’t recycle. Kids spend six hours in front of screens seeing this stuff every day!”

Now making interactive stories with diverse role models, her first story-app, Detective Dot, reached over 30 countries on Kickstarter. Sophie is extremely passionate about better media for children, sustainability and equality.