Our team lives in 20 countries. That’s not a hiring strategy, it’s the product.

When we build a lesson about a country, someone on our team has almost certainly lived there. Not visited. Lived.

Someone on the team grew up in Brazil and now lives in Germany. Someone who shapes our work grew up in Gaza and now lives in Egypt. Another carries roots in both the Philippines and Hong Kong. This was not a strategic choice. It is just who found us when we were looking for the right people.

But I have come to see it differently now. It is not incidental. It is the whole point.

Who actually makes what your child sees

Parents reasonably wonder who is behind an app their child spends time with. The honest answer for Unomundi is: a small, scrappy team spread across a lot of the world.

Between us, we have lived in the UK, Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Egypt, Mexico, Ireland, Hungary, Pakistan, Portugal, the Philippines, Nigeria, Brazil, Ukraine, Russia, Spain, France, the USA, Hong Kong, and Palestine. That list is not curated. It is just the team.

The team ranges from their twenties to their sixties. Christians, Muslims, Hindus, spiritual people, and atheists. We even have a Dudeist priest. If you do not know what that is, neither did I before he joined. Now I do.

What it means to carry more than one home

Many of us are between places. A Dutch teammate working from Mexico. A Russian teammate now in Germany. A Nigerian teammate in the UK. A Spanish teammate in Portugal. A French teammate in Hungary. A Ukrainian teammate who has had to leave home.

These are not just interesting biographical facts. They are the qualification that matters most for this work.

Every one of these people has sat across a table from someone who did not quite understand where they were from. Has had to explain their culture to someone who had never encountered it. Has felt the gap between how a place is described from the outside and how it is actually lived on the inside. That gap is exactly what we are trying to close.

When you have felt that gap yourself, you build differently. You notice when a lesson flattens a culture into a cliche. You know when a story is true and when it is a postcard. You push back, because you know the difference.

Why lived experience shapes the lessons, not just the research

We do the research. Every country we cover is fact-checked, reviewed, and held against community sources. But research alone cannot tell you what something feels like from the inside.

It cannot tell you that a particular story is told one way in the capital and a completely different way in the countryside. It cannot tell you which word carries warmth and which one carries distance. It cannot tell you when an image of a place is honest and when it is a tourist board fantasy.

People who have lived inside a culture carry that. You cannot learn it from a textbook. You can only learn it by being there, or by listening carefully to someone who was.

Unomundi is a cultural-discovery app where children aged 6 to 12 explore countries and cultures through stories, games, and conversations with Una, a warm AI guide. Una speaks from a place of genuine cultural knowledge. That knowledge belongs to the people behind her.

We did not plan a global team. We found the right people.

Matt and I, as co-founders, made a deliberate decision early on. We would not fill seats. We would find people who believed in this mission and happened to have exactly the right experience for it. The global spread was a side effect of that choice.

The result is a team that can build lessons about Brazil because someone on that team grew up there, then left, then understood their own country differently from the outside. Can write about Nigeria because someone knows what gets lost in translation between Lagos and life in the UK. Can write about Palestine, because someone on the team grew up in Gaza and still carries what home means.

I find that last one particularly important. Not because it is heavy, though it is. Because it means that when we cover that part of the world, we do not do it from a comfortable distance. We do it with the care of someone who has skin in it.

What this means for your child

When your child explores Japan in Unomundi, the person who shaped that content has almost certainly been confused by jet lag in Tokyo, ordered the wrong thing from a menu they could not read, laughed at themselves for it, and come away loving the place more for the stumble.

When your child hears a story set in Mexico, the person behind it likely knows the smell of a particular market at a particular time of day.

This is not a guarantee of perfection. We will get things wrong, and we have a process for correcting them. But it is a guarantee that we are trying, with the right people, in the right way. Because the alternative, building a product about the world without any real connection to it, would be precisely the kind of postcard culture we are trying to move children beyond.

That is not a hiring strategy. It is the product.

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FAQs

Who makes the content in Unomundi?

Unomundi's content is built by a small global team who have collectively lived in 20 countries, from Brazil and Nigeria to Palestine, Hong Kong, and the Philippines. Many carry more than one cultural home, which shapes how every lesson is written.

Why does Unomundi use people with lived cultural experience?

Research alone cannot capture what a culture feels like from the inside. People who have lived between cultures know when a story is authentic and when it is a postcard version. That knowledge goes directly into the lessons children see.

What is Unomundi?

Unomundi is a cultural-discovery app where children aged 6 to 12 explore countries and cultures through stories, games, and conversations with Una, a warm AI guide.