The investment will help the company scale its nationwide network of therapists by using AI to automate clinical notes while keeping clinicians at the centre of care.
Saltroad, the clinician-led speech and language therapy (SLT) provider, has raised £1.5 million and acquired Ogma, an AI documentation platform designed for SLT. The round was led by Techstart Ventures, with participation from Ascension, ScaleX and a group of prominent angel investors.
An estimated 1 in 5 children – around two million in the UK – need support with speech, language and communication, and demand far outstrips supply.
Services built for a different era can’t keep pace, and families and therapists have been left to absorb the trade-offs: reports instead of therapy, rationed time, endless admin and caseloads that don’t fit.
Saltroad’s premise is that none of this is inevitable. It gives families private access to NHS speech and language therapists, meaning a wider pool of specialists to choose from, therapists matched to their child’s clinical needs, no waiting lists, and support that costs less than traditional private therapy.
Integrating the Ogma acquisition turns the raw material of a therapy session into structured, clinically useful notes – cutting after-hours admin and standardising record quality across the workforce.
By embedding AI tooling across its network of over 1,000 therapists across the UK, Saltroad aims to increase the number of children each therapist can see without compromising clinical quality or therapist wellbeing.
According to Darren Lester, co-founder and CEO of Saltroad, too many children wait months, sometimes years, for help during the years that matter most.
“That isn’t a failure of effort from therapists – it’s a system that was never built for the scale or variety of need it now faces. Saltroad exists to put the therapy back into speech and language therapy, and to reach the families the current systems can’t.
This funding, and the Ogma acquisition, supports how we build that and deliver tailored, 1:1 speech therapy at scale.”
Audrey Osborne, Partner at Techstart Ventures, said:
“We’ve backed Saltroad since inception, and everything since has deepened our conviction in Darren, Debi and the team.
The combination of a scalable therapist workforce and purpose-built AI is exactly the kind of ambition we want to support in Northern Ireland.”
Toyosi Ogedengbe, Partner at Ascension, said:
“We look for teams solving problems that genuinely matter, at scale, and Saltroad does exactly that. From the start, Saltroad has been clear-eyed about a real and growing problem.
Bringing AI alongside skilled clinicians, rather than in place of them, is the right way to widen access without lowering the bar.”
The funding and acquisition support Saltroad’s plan to build an AI-enabled SLT workforce – pairing the flexibility of an associate model with purpose-built tools that free therapists to spend more time with the children who need support, and less on admin.