Built by People Who
Saw the Problem Firsthand

The Founding Story

Built at the Kitchen Table

Our mom is a teacher. She has been for years — the kind who stays late, takes work home, and genuinely cares about every student in her class. So when she described what oral reading fluency assessments actually look like in practice, we paid attention.

Pull a student aside. Hold a stopwatch. Listen carefully. Track every error by hand on a paper form. Count words per minute. Record the score. File the sheet. Move to the next student. Repeat — twenty-five times, every few weeks. A task that matters deeply, buried under a process that doesn't have to be this hard.

Ben couldn't let that go. Speech recognition had gotten accurate enough to transcribe a child reading aloud in real time. The AI to detect fluency patterns already existed. What didn't exist was something simple enough for a real classroom — something a teacher could actually pick up and use without a training session. So he built it.

Madelyn joined to keep it grounded. She talks to teachers, shapes what gets built and what doesn't, and makes sure PhonoFlow solves the right problem — not just the impressive-sounding one. And our mom became one of our first pilot teachers, running PhonoFlow in her own classroom and telling us exactly what worked and what didn't.

We're small and we're early. But the problem is real, the feedback from classrooms has been clear, and we're just getting started.