An Austin-based speech therapy startup has raised millions in new investment to add to its clinical network of therapists across the nation.
Expressable, which has a platform to connect patients with its speech-language pathologists, said May 21 that it raised a $26 million series B funding round led by Boston-based firm HarbourVest Partners. Other investors included Digitalis Ventures, F-Prime Capital and Lerer Hippeau.
Wife-and-husband duo Leanne Sherred and Nick Barbara founded the startup in 2019. Sherred has a deep background in speech therapy, including work at the RiverKids Pediatric Home Health Therapy Agency in Austin, as well as several other speech therapy organizations in Central Texas.
"Across all of those settings, it became clear immediately coming out of grad school that lots of the individuals and families who needed care, were not able to access it for various reasons," Sherred said. "I wasn't able to get to them, they weren't able to get to me. But on top of that, the way that the care was being delivered excluded families and caregivers from the therapeutic process, and that's just not what the research tells us that we should be doing."
So she set out to build a better model, leveraging tele-practice to help overcome geographical barriers and reach patients during the afternoon and evening hours that work for them.
Expressable offers a variety of speech therapy solutions, including accent modification, voice disorders and public speaking for adults.
But its largest group of customers are children and their parents. That's because speech disorders are most prevalent and addressable among young children, and many seniors get speech therapy through traditional home health and nursing home models.
Initially, customers paid privately for Expressable's therapy offerings. But the company has found far more traction since developing an insurer-paid model. Now, a majority of its clients use commercial Medicare Advantage or Medicaid insurance.
"There are thousands of kids, if not millions of kids, across the country who go without services every year due to full access issues and lack of available providers to serve them, despite the fact that there's 171,000 working speech language pathologists out there in the United States," Barbara said. "There are some core operational supply-demand matching challenges that exists in traditional brick and mortar care delivery."
Since bringing in more insured customers, the company has hired hundreds of speech therapists nationwide to help meet demand. For many therapists, it's a welcomed change, Sherred said.
"There are a lot of constraints in the field that lead to some some subpar working experiences," she said.
Expressable, which has 50-plus corporate employees who mostly work remotely, says it's doubling down on growing its network of therapists.
"We never want to take for granted how important building the best quality clinical network is to success," Barbara said. "At the end of the day, we can build a lot of bells and whistles around care, but consumers are looking for the highest quality care and that starts with the provider, and that's been really core to our vision and strategy today."
