Helping Children Find Their Voice

Recently seen in Sifted, “Two kids in every classroom have a development language disorder — this startup wants to help”. Communication, fuels our relationships, it’s vital for helping us thrive professionally and personally. Noala is on a mission to support each individual to find their voice, starting today!

Julia Hawkins, General Partner at LocalGlobe, said: “Emilie and her team at Noala are on a mission to make speech and language therapy mainstream. Leveraging their digital platform, they aim to reduce the friction usually associated with accessing speech and language therapy treatment. As we’ve seen in other pillars of the health sector in the wake of Covid, tele-therapy presents a significant opportunity to improve access but only when it's built with inclusion in mind, and only when it's backed with clinical authority. Noala has encapsulated this with its platform-led approach and Emilie’s inspiring motivation.”

We show appreciation to Kai Nicol-Schwarz, Sifted reporter, for giving us the opportunity to share this important milestone “Considering the number of children that could be helped with speech and language therapy — and the general shift to digital in healthcare — it seems like only a matter of time before we see a major startup success story in the space.”

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Noala, a London-based speech and language therapy platform for children, has raised $4m in a seed round led by LocalGlobe, as it looks to double down on services in the US and grow its team.

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What do we do?

Noala was founded in 2021 as an app that speech and language professionals could use to help run their clinics in the UK and US. Then a few months after launching we released its direct-to-consumer children’s therapy platform in the UK, combining digital activities with weekly sessions led by speech and language professionals.

Our platform for children costs £30 a week — which our founder Emilie Spire says is about a third of the price of standard speech and language therapy for kids — and currently charge professionals that use the practice management software £2.50 per patient. While we don’t share specific customer numbers, figures for both families and clinics are in the hundreds.

At the end of this week, Noala will stop charging professionals who are using our software, says Spire, as it looks to make speech and language therapy more mainstream and accessible.

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Who invested in us?

• The round was led by LocalGlobe
• With participation from Cocoa Ventures, and angels from BlaBlaCar, Kry, Mirakl and Peak

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Sifted’s take

The money pumped into digital speech and language therapy startups so far is paltry in comparison to the vast sums that have been flowing into health-tech as a whole over the past few years — but it’s still very early days for the sector.

Spire points out that until US-based mental health app Headspace — which exited for $3bn in 2021 — came along, mindfulness also hadn’t been taught digitally on a mass scale.

Considering the number of children that could be helped with speech and language therapy — and the general shift to digital in healthcare — it seems like only a matter of time before we see a major startup success story in the space.

Read more on noala on Sifted, by reporter Kai Nicol-Schwarz here.