Expressable launches with millions for scalable speech therapy

Expressable is a digital speech therapy company that connects patients to speech language pathologists (SLP) via telehealth services and asynchronous support, and it has raised a new $4.5 million seed round.

The early-stage startup is launching with an explicit focus on serving the approximately five million children in the United States that have a communication disorder.

Put simply, Expressable connects children to speech-language pathologists on a recurring basis.

The activities are meant to be bite-sized – used when driving to the grocery store or cooking dinner or playing in the backyard – and tailored for interaction with children.

“There’s a lot of content for speech language pathologists by speech language pathologists, but not a lot of content by [SLPs] for parents, written in a way that is consumable,” Barbara said.

The majority of Expressable’s user base are children, but about 35% are adults, signaling how speech issues can continue past childhood.

One challenge for any digital telehealth startup, Expressable included, is how to make a convincing pitch for moving caretaking fully-virtual in a post-pandemic context.

“We have built a career path for SLPs and a value proposition to speech language pathologists where they can work from home, set their own hours [get] paid above the national average, and then receive benefits that may not be obviously not common if you’re working in a contractor position.”

The startup will have to rapidly (and efficiently) hire SLPs for the variety of speaking conditions out there – and in order to expand into new markets, it has to go through the arduous legal process of local licensing requirements, instead of just going to a white-label solution that helps staff similar companies while offloading individual practitioner certification

While it has ambitions to become a national practice, Expressable currently operates in 15 states, and employs SLPs that are licensed in all the states that it operates in