Why we built it
It started with a piece of news we couldn’t put down. Someone would take an ordinary photo of a child, a sports day shot, a face from a school website, and feed it into an AI tool. Minutes later that innocent photo had become something the child never posed for. In the worst cases, abuse material used to blackmail the school itself.
We read those stories as two people who sit on exactly the two sides of this problem: a classroom-and-fieldwork side, and a build-technology-for-students side. We knew what schools were responsible for, we knew what the technology could now do, and we knew almost no one was building the thing in between. So we did.
The two of us
Bryan Liew
Safeguarding and go-to-market
Bryan Liew has spent five years in international-school outdoor and residential education, the corner of school life where safeguarding stops being a policy document and becomes the entire job. When the deepfake threat appeared, his view was simple: this is the same duty of care, it has just moved online.
Zero Ong
Product and technology
Zero Ong founded JomStudy and built it into one of Malaysia’s most widely used student platforms, with over 600,000 downloads and a place on the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia list. He has spent his career building tools teachers recommend and students actually open, which is why Topeng starts from the child, not the software.
What we believe
Every child deserves control over their own face online, and a school should be able to publish a proud moment without quietly gambling with a student’s safety.
We are honest about what protection can and cannot do. Topeng significantly reduces the risk that a published photo can be turned against a child. It does not eliminate that risk, and we will never tell you it does. We would rather be the company a school can defend to its parents and its board, because everything we say is true.
Most safeguarding technology is built by technologists who have never been responsible for a child, or bought from vendors who have never built anything a student would use. Topeng is the rare case where both sides are in the room.
We are that answer. We are Topeng.