About Puffling
Puffling is a Detroit-area family company helping parents make books something children look forward to. Its iOS app recommends personalized activities for children ages 0–6, adapting ideas to a family’s available time, energy, interests, and materials.
Puffling is also developing its first physical product: a story-box concept for ages 3–5 with 2–3 carefully selected children’s books, hands-on materials that extend each theme, and caregiver-side app personalization. The books, age range, contents, and other final details may change as the company tests the concept with families.
Together, the app and box are meant to bridge good intentions and real family life: less pressure to push early reading, and more shared stories, conversation, and play that children want to revisit.
Boilerplate
Puffling is a Detroit-area family company helping parents bring children’s books to life. Its first story-box concept pairs 2–3 carefully selected books with hands-on activities and caregiver-side app personalization designed to make shared reading more joyful and easier to revisit. Puffling also offers a personalized iOS activity app for children ages 0–6. Final story-box details may change. Founded in 2025 and based in the Detroit area. Learn more at puffling.ai.
Key Facts
- Founded
- 2025
- Founding Team Expertise
- Product, engineering, and doctoral-level early education
- Headquarters
- Detroit area, Michigan
- Stage
- iOS app live; first story box in development
- Products
- Personalized iOS app and a story-box concept centered on children’s books
- Age Ranges
- App: ages 0–6; first story-box concept: ages 3–5
- Editorial Approach
- Read our standards
- Website
- puffling.ai
Our Story
Puffling began with two parents who got tired of the gap between wanting to do their best and knowing what that actually looks like on a random Wednesday. Laura and Andrew Cavanagh met as teenagers, built careers in technology, and then became parents. Laura brought years of product marketing experience from Meta, Lyft, and Coursera. Andrew brought more than a decade of engineering experience at Meta, Facebook, and Target. They shared one practical frustration: why was it so hard to find one good, realistic activity for their kids?
Not a craft that required seventeen supplies. Not a 45-minute sensory bin. Just one simple thing that would make a real difference — and fit into the ten minutes they actually had.
They started with the app they wished they’d had when their first son was born. The founding team has since expanded and now combines product, engineering, firsthand family experience, and doctoral-level early-education expertise. Its first physical product focuses that experience on reading: choose books with care, bring their stories into play, and help families return to them without turning reading into a race.
Leadership Profiles
Public bios and media contacts for Puffling’s CEO and CTO.
Laura Cavanagh
Co-Founder & CEO
Laura Cavanagh is the co-founder and CEO of Puffling, a family play company whose iOS app recommends personalized activities for children ages 0–6. A former product marketing leader at Meta, Lyft, and Coursera, Laura helped build Puffling after becoming a mom and seeing how difficult it was to find one realistic, useful play idea. She holds a master’s in journalism from Northwestern and lives outside Detroit with her husband, two young sons, and an emotionally needy sourdough starter.
Read full bio
Laura Cavanagh spent a decade in product marketing at some of the most recognizable names in tech — Meta, Lyft, and Coursera — helping millions of people find the right product at the right moment. But when she became a mom, she realized no one was doing that for parents.
The early days of motherhood hit her like a freight train. She’d spent years launching products with meticulous go-to-market plans, competitive analyses, and carefully segmented audiences — and suddenly she was Googling “is my baby’s poop normal” at 3 AM, scrolling through conflicting developmental advice, and feeling like the one product she couldn’t figure out was parenthood itself. She didn’t need more information. She needed the right information, at the right time, for her kid. That’s why she built Puffling.
Before founding Puffling, Laura drove product marketing for Meta’s integrity and recruiting products, managed the go-to-market strategy for Lyft’s autonomous vehicle program, and launched nine online degree products at Coursera. Earlier in her career, she worked as a journalist — covering everything from national security policy to local government — with bylines in The Atlantic, Chicago Tribune, and others. She holds a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University’s Medill School.
Laura lives outside Detroit with her husband Andrew and their two young boys. She volunteers with Postpartum Support International and maintains a sourdough starter that, like her children, requires constant attention and occasional pep talks.
Andrew Cavanagh
Co-Founder & CTO
Andrew Cavanagh is the co-founder and CTO of Puffling. A Senior Engineering Manager at Meta, Andrew built Messenger’s ML and Product Foundation teams, powering recommendation systems that reach billions of users. At Puffling, he brings big-tech machine learning expertise to the deeply personal challenge of helping parents show up for their kids. He lives outside Detroit with his wife Laura and their two sons.
Read full bio
Andrew Cavanagh has spent over a decade building products that reach billions of people. As a Senior Engineering Manager at Meta, he built Messenger’s Machine Learning and Product Foundation teams from the ground up and his work has powered state-of-the-art recommendation systems driving hundreds of millions of message sends and deployed ranking models to billions of users worldwide.
But the product that changed Andrew’s perspective wasn’t built at a big tech company — it was watching his wife struggle to find trustworthy, practical developmental activities for their kids amid the overwhelming flood of parenting content online. As an engineer, the problem was obvious: the information existed, but no one had built the system to personalize it, filter the noise, and deliver it when it actually mattered.
At Puffling, Andrew leads all engineering and technical strategy, bringing the same machine learning expertise he applied at Meta’s scale to a deeply personal problem. Before Meta, he led mobile engineering for Facebook Messenger, built Target’s innovation lab’s mobile platform from concept to beta, and was the first mobile engineer at WeddingWire, where he built the company’s entire mobile engineering organization.
Andrew started his career as a research scientist at Henry Ford Health System before discovering his passion for software engineering. He lives outside Detroit with Laura and their two boys, and builds Puffling in the hours between bedtime stories and (his own) bedtime.
What Parents Are Saying
“First of all this is SO COOL!!! I love the idea and execution! It’s honestly fantastic.”
Rebecca Hood
Puffling Parent
“The activities are GREAT!! The instructions for each are so in depth and I felt my children would really enjoy each suggestion.”
Franki De La Vega
Puffling Parent
“This feels like a lifeline for these long, freezing cold weekend days here in New Hampshire when we can’t get outside.”
Laura Perrotta
Puffling Parent
“It was clear from the beginning that Puffling is an app designed to help parents quickly find and carry out fun, engaging activities with their kids.”
Jean Choi
Puffling Parent
In the News
The Bump
Time-Saving Hacks for Working MomsPuffling founder Laura Cavanagh shares practical time-saving strategies for working parents.
Media Assets
Logo
Puffling logo (transparent background)
Download LogoFounder Photos
App Screenshots
Click to download full-resolution screenshots (PNG)
Press Inquiries
For media inquiries, interview requests, or additional information, please get in touch.
hello@puffling.ai