KTH Holding invests in Dialog- enabling speech rehabilitation for everyone
KTH Holding welcomes Dialog speech and language technologies AB as new portfolio company. Dialog’s software platform is making speech rehabilitation more available for patients with aphasia. Aphasia is the inability to understand or speak language and affects millions of people every year, often because of a stroke. However, there is a lack of speech therapist to provide the necessary training hours to rehabilitate patients. With Dialog patients can themselves perform home-based, independent and tailored training to facilitate for speech therapist and the public healthcare system.Losing the ability to speak can be devastating for a person and only in Sweden more than 200 000 people live with aphasia and 12 000 new aphasia cases appear yearly. Stroke is a common cause but also accidents or neurological diseases. Regular speech training can make significant improvements but few patients get the weekly hours required due to a lack of speech therapists and resources. Dialog was founded by KTH students Filippa Kärrfelt, Mikael Törnwall and Isak Pettersson. They are computer scientists having studied machine learning and speech technologies. Mikael also had first-hand experience from a relative experiencing aphasia. They saw an opportunity to digitalize the speech rehabilitation process and make it more efficient and accessible than today.“The company came into being from a personal problem experienced by one of our co-founders, and our common passion for AI and language technology. The speech therapy field has so far experienced relatively low levels of digitalization but we see great demand for digital solutions and massive potential given the recent advancements in technology”, says Filippa Kärrfelt, founder and CEO of Dialog. The company has been developed with the support of KTH Innovation and has completed the KTH Innovation pre-incubator program and is now part of Sting incubator. The company launched its software during 2023 and now has first customers such as City of Helsinki. The plan is to launch in the Nordics first and expand to EU during 2024. The product is also being developed to include AI and speech recognition to enable more efficient individual training. Long term the company sees potential to expand the platform to other language and cognitive disorders to serve the broader speech therapist and cognitive rehabilitation community. “The market of speech training is today largely not digitalized and the public healthcare system is in need of new digital tools to improve efficiency and patient outcome. We are glad to be an investor taking part in building the company further and think there are more market segments that can be targeted using the technology platform”, says Daniel Carlsson, Investment Manager at KTH Holding AB. About Dialog: Dialog is a health technology company developing an innovative platform designed specifically for speech and language pathologists and individuals living with aphasia. With Dialog platform, speech therapists can provide exercises that patients can do anywhere, anytime. www.dialog-therapy.com.com
