Company: Quinly Ltd
Founder: Ruth Sparkes
Website: https://quinly.ai
About Quinly Ltd
According to the Centre of Expertise on Child Sexual Abuse, 500,000 children are sexually abused in England and Wales every year and teachers hear about only one in thirty of those cases, with disclosure typically taking seven years. Quinly is an anonymous AI safeguarding tool for children aged 7 to 17+, delivered as a single line of embed code on any school website, built to reach a child who needs support to get real world help.
Quinly launched in April 2025, founder Ruth Sparkes built the company alone after more than two decades in education communications, designing a product schools could adopt without new infrastructure, extra staff or a lengthy procurement cycle.
The growth model has proved itself once already. A twelve month pilot with six academies, five of them part of the E-ACT trust, one of the largest multi academy trusts in England, ended with E-ACT adopting Quinly across its full from 21 September 2026, a group of 37 schools signed up nationally. That is the pattern the business is built to repeat: one school or trust trials the product, safeguarding leads shape it around what they actually need, and the trust rolls it out in full once the evidence is there. Pricing is a flat £495 per school per year, deliberately set below the cost of a single delegate place on a safeguarding training course and deployment takes less than an hour because there is no MIS integration and no infrastructure for an IT team to manage.
The product itself was built through that same customer relationship rather than in isolation. Designated Safeguarding Leads across the E-ACT pilot took the crisis detection engine from 24 categories of harm to 41 and drove the build of the analytics dashboard, downloadable reporting and sentiment analysis now standard in every deployment. The pilot generated 5,785 anonymous conversations in twelve months, 79 per cent outside school hours and one in six between 10pm and 6am, data that gave E-ACT the evidence it needed to commit trust wide rather than treating the pilot as a one-off.
The scalability case beyond the UK is already underway, with a French version live at quinly.fr and the GDPR and data residency work done to operate it lawfully in the EU, built on the same single line of code model that made UK deployment fast.
Recognition has followed rather than led the growth: coverage in The Sunday Times, HuffPost UK and Social Care Today, a ranking in TechRound’s own top 45 AI innovations list and a SeedLegals Startup Awards shortlist in the Game Changer category. Pilot findings were also submitted as evidence to two UK government consultations, on the ten year mental health strategy and on AI age restrictions for children.
For the SaaS ecosystem, Quinly is a case study in a product with almost no data footprint still generating a durable customer relationship: a pilot that earned trust wide adoption, priced for a sector with limited budget and built to expand into new territories on the same lightweight model.
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