Children’s speech and language therapy (SLT) startup Saltroad has secured £575,000 in pre-seed funding.
The investment, led by Techstart Ventures and Ascension VC, will go towards building a core team in Belfast to deliver SLT services across the UK.
Saltroad said it will also use the funds to recruit more engineers to further develop its platform, which matches parents with registered speech therapists.
Two million children in the UK currently require SLT. For children who struggle to talk and understand words, their whole lives are affected, according to SLT UK, a charity organisation campaigning for better support.
SLT UK says these children are six times more likely to be behind in English at age 11, twice as likely to be unemployed as adults, and more prone to mental health problems.
Saltroad’s husband and wife founders, Darren and Debi Lester, believe their digital marketplace will help reduce waiting times for therapy, which in the past has been as long as two years.
The aim of the startup is to remove the tedious administrative tasks of running a practice so private practitioners can easily access patients, freeing up more time for delivering actual therapy.
Without the routine admin, the hope is the platform will create further capacity in the market, allowing more patients to be seen at a quicker rate.
Debi has over 12 years of experience as a speech and language therapist in both the NHS and the private sector, while her husband Darren built SpecifiedBy.com, an online marketplace in the construction product sector in the UK, which he sold in 2021.
Combining their expertise, the pair believe their platform will change “not only how children and families access SLT, but also how therapists work.”
Speaking to UKTN, Debi said: “More and more children each year are being identified as having some sort of speech, language, or communication need. Early intervention, and in many cases ongoing long-term support, is absolutely vital in ensuring that these children have the same life chances as others.
“Current SLT provision in the UK (and beyond) simply doesn’t meet the need, and so we are heading for a pretty bleak future for the next generation if this isn’t addressed.”