Saltroad, the clinician-led speech and language therapy provider, has raised £1.5 million and acquired Ogma, an AI documentation platform built for speech and language therapy. The round was led by Techstart Ventures, with participation from Ascension, ScaleX and a group of prominent angel investors. The funding and acquisition support Saltroad's plan to build an AI-enabled speech and language therapy workforce, pairing the flexibility of an associate model with purpose-built tools intended to free therapists to spend more time with children and less on admin.
An estimated 1 in 5 children, around two million in the UK, need support with speech, language and communication, and demand outstrips supply. Services built for a different era cannot keep pace, leaving families and therapists to absorb the trade-offs of reports instead of therapy, rationed time, admin and caseloads that do not fit. Saltroad gives families private access to NHS speech and language therapists, offering a wider pool of specialists to choose from, therapists matched to a 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.
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.
Our model pairs the skills, experience and kindness of therapists with modern tools and processes. The line we hold is non-negotiable: AI supports the clinician, it never replaces clinical judgement. The Saltroad Assistant takes away the admin that pulls therapists away from children - all within the governance and supervision our profession expects.
