About
A small company, built to last longer than a trend.
Arete Ventures LLC is a Virginia limited liability company in Glen Allen, VA. It builds and publishes a small number of consumer mobile apps. That is the whole business — there is no consulting arm, no agency work, and no outside investors to answer to.
Why the name Areté
Areté is a Greek word for excellence — not winning, but living up to what something is capable of being.
It is not a word about winning. It is a word about a thing becoming as good as the thing is capable of being — which is a reasonable standard to hold software to, and a reasonable thing to want for the people using it.
That is the whole ambition here: build mobile applications and services that leave people a little better off than they were. Not more engaged. Better off.
What we believe
What we believe
Build for the long haul
We would rather ship one app that lasts a decade than five that last a season. Nothing here is built to be flipped.
Earn the data we hold
We collect the minimum an app needs to work, we say plainly what that is, and we delete it when you ask. We do not sell it, and we never will.
Respect the person on the other side
No dark patterns, no engagement traps, no manufactured urgency. You should be able to put our apps down and get on with your day.
Who is behind this
Matt Ontell
Founder
Arete Ventures LLC is a one-person company. Matt Ontell is the sole member, and writes the software, the policies, and the reply when you email support.
That is worth stating plainly, because it tells you what to expect. A one-person company ships slowly. It also means there is no support queue between you and the person who can actually fix your problem, and no growth target that would make selling your data tempting.
Building for families
Symptom Kids and KidEarn are built for parents, not for children. A parent uses the app to help their child — recording symptoms, or setting up and overseeing money habits.
Our apps are not used by anyone under 18. Children do not create accounts, do not sign in, and do not enter anything themselves. Every account belongs to an adult, and everything recorded is entered and reviewed by that adult.
That distinction is worth being precise about. Because a child is never a user, we collect nothing from a child and there is no child account to obtain consent for. What we do hold — in Symptom Kids especially — is information about a child, entered by their parent. Being parent-facing simplifies the legal picture. It does not lower the standard for looking after that information.
We would rather lose a signup than hold something about a family that we could not justify to them in plain language.
Get in touch
Email support@areteventuresllc.com for anything about the apps, or privacy@areteventuresllc.com for anything about your data.