Ello, developer of the world’s most advanced AI reading coach, announced today that it has secured its Series A funding. Leading Ello’s $15M Series A is Goodwater Capital, with major participation from Homebrew (returning investors), Reed Hastings, Common Sense Growth, and Ravensburger. This adds to existing funding led by Project A with additional investors Y Combinator, WndrCo, Reach Capital, Visible Ventures, and Khosla Ventures. Coddy Johnson from Goodwater and Anton Waitz from Project A Ventures have joined the board alongside the three co-founders.
The U.S. has a big problem with child literacy. The NAEP – Nation’s Report Card – shows that 67% of 4th graders cannot read proficiently. Ello is helping kids, parents and teachers overcome this challenge and democratizing education through its AI-based reading tools. With a mission to empower every child to become a competent, enthusiastic reader, regardless of their resources or environment, Ello excels at precisely aligning books with a child’s reading proficiency and interests, meeting the child where they are on their reading journey, and fostering that child’s motivation and skill development.
Ello wholeheartedly champions the Science of Reading approach, which places an emphasis on equipping children with the essential decoding skills required for reading mastery. With Ello, children do not guess or ‘cue’ based on pictures in the book, they are taken along a journey of mastery of phonics, and supported in the process of decoding words as they read engaging stories tailored to their abilities and interests. Ello is powered by proprietary speech recognition and AI. It listens, understands, and engages with children to teach them critical reading skills. With patent-pending speech recognition that is accurate at a phoneme level, Ello can understand a child in a way technology has been unable to before. It outperforms OpenAI’s Whisper, known to be the best speech recognition technology on the market, as well as Google Cloud’s speech API.
“Ello is tackling the issue of child literacy head on, leveraging AI to solve the reading challenges kids face, through a fun, engaging 1:1 reading coach,” said Coddy Johnson, Partner at Goodwater Capital. “Coming out of the pandemic, as both parents and teachers struggle to help children get caught up on basic reading skills, Ello is making a major difference to thousands of families. We are excited to support them as they further develop their product and take their next step on the road to empower every child’s reading journey.”
Source: Globe Newswire
