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Seven finalists pitched their ventures live at the HolonIQ Back to School Summit in New York City. Media Contact: Jackie Jircitano, Catalyst @ Penn GSE Communicationsjackie@alessicommunication.com *Note for TV and
Spoken Tower is a voice-controlled, fast-paced video game that combines three learning programs in one:
Players choose what skill they want to work on, then climb the tower through high-repetition practice inside real gameplay.
Spoken Tower is designed for elementary-aged learners (typically ages 5–11) including:
It can be used at home, in therapy, or in schools.
Spoken Tower is not worksheets on a screen. It delivers:
Most importantly, it’s powered by a specialized speech recognition engine tuned for kids, which enables interactive speech-driven practice instead of passive clicking.
Articulation Mode supports intensive practice of:
It’s built to improve speech clarity and intelligibility through high-frequency practice.
Yes. You can select:
This allows precise targeting for articulation and phonological intervention.
Yes. Spoken Tower supports pattern-level practice through phonology targeting, contrastive patterns, and structured repetition—making it appropriate for many children with phonological processes impacting intelligibility.
Reading Tower covers a full early literacy progression, including:
Yes. You can select from built-in reading categories or upload your own custom word list for personalized practice (great for IEPs, classroom lists, or curriculum vocabulary).
Math Tower focuses on automaticity and fluency in core operations:
Math content is designed for elementary learners and supports repeated practice that builds speed, accuracy, and automatic recall.
The flow is simple:
Yes. Spoken Tower starts with easier targets and becomes more complex as players improve, keeping challenge level appropriate while maintaining motivation.
Spoken Tower uses a specialized speech recognition engine tuned to children’s speech. This enables the game to listen, respond, and provide interactive practice rather than simply giving passive exercises.
No speech recognition system is perfect—especially with children and disordered speech. Spoken Tower reduces this through:
Yes.
Spoken Tower tracks practice data for schools or clinics. The game has a STATS option that displays all the targets words per day or over time. There is also a special dashboard which will give you access to the progress of a given user or student.
Yes. Spoken Tower can generate automatic progress reports designed to support:
No. Spoken Tower is designed to augment therapy and instruction by increasing dosage. It provides the high repetition that is hard to achieve through traditional sessions alone, while keeping practice motivating.
For best results, short frequent sessions work well (example: 10–15 minutes/day, 4–5 days/week). Many children improve fastest with consistent repetition over time.
Spoken Tower is available for download on iOS devices including iPads and iPhones. Check the App Store for the minimum requirements.
Yes. Spoken Tower is designed for school implementation and supports classroom and therapy use cases, including progress tracking and reporting.
SAY IT Labs
Erich Reiter, Erich holds a M.Sc.in Speech and Communication Disorders from the Massachusetts General Hospital, and an M.Sc. in Computational Linguistics from the University of Buffalo. Erich started his career in 2004 working as a speech recognition engineer in the Silicon Valley for Nuance Communications, the original makers of SIRI. In 2012, after losing a friend to ALS, a new interest in technology for people with speech disorders emerged. Erich left Nuance in 2014 to become a speech and language pathologist.
In 2019, Erich co-founded SAY IT Labs where he combines his knowledge of artificial intelligence, speech recognition, and speech and language pathology to create video games for people with speech disorders.
Limbic AI
Nathaniel Rose is the Co-Founder of Lymbic AI and a neurotechnology researcher building novel authentication paradigms through brain-computer interfaces. During his graduate studies, Nathaniel’s previous research under Dr. Aldo Faisal at Imperial College London focused on immersive applications using gaze selection and non-invasive BCI for the control of open-sourced robotic platforms. He has over 10 years of software engineering experience having led development teams at Microsoft, Circle Pay & Ripple, provisioning distributed data platform infrastructure, automated ML operation pipelines, and web3 smart contract governance for the XRP ledger. Nathaniel and his team at Lymbic AI now pioneering brain signal biometric security to combat the growing cyberattacks and authentication exploits in the industry.
Neurolentech
Fiona Nielsen, CEO of Neurolentech – Serial entrepreneur in bioinformatics, genomics and big data. Previously at Illumina and Genomics England and o2h; Founder of DNAdigest and co-founder of Repositive.
In 2013 Fiona founded the charity DNAdigest promoting best practices for efficient and ethical data sharing for genomics research for the benefit of patients. She next founded the startup Repositive, a company that focused on sharing of genetic data and patient-derived cancer models for preclinical research. Fiona led Repositive for 7 years as CEO, partnering with 25+ biopharma and preclinical CROs worldwide creating a global marketplace for patient-derived preclinical cancer models. Fiona Nielsen has accumulated several accolades, among them Highly Commended for CEO of the year by Cambridge Independent Science and Technology Awards as well as WISE100 – Women in Social Enterprise. Fiona is a highly sought after speaker and mentor for companies in life sciences and technology. Fiona joined Neurolentech on a part-time basis from December 2022 and full-time from April 2023.
MindAhead
Nina Kiwit is a serial entrepreneur with a background in predictive modeling, design thinking, and digital health. She led and built two previous startups, one in fintech that exited in 2022 and one in healthcare that is running successfully with about 100 employees in the US and Germany. In her role as managing director at MindAhead, she strives to combine AI with personalized healthcare to combat the world’s increasing cognitive decline.
Axinesis
Pieter Van den Steen started his career as an environmental economist in researcher and consulting.
After his MBA at INSEAD he oriented his career on healthcare and has worked for the last 20 years in the medical devices industry with growing international responsibilities in commercial and general management functions. He joined big companies like J&J and Boston Scientific and worked for the last 7 years for start-ups of which nearly 4 years as CEO of Axinesis.
Professor of Paediatric Neurology, Royal Hospital for Children, Glasgow, UK; Board Member, European Paediatric Neurology Society; Board Member, European Brain Council
Sameer is Paediatric Neurologist at the Royal Hospital for Children and Honorary Professor, University of Glasgow. His interests include epilepsy, neurogenetics and innovation. He leads the Paediatric Neurosciences Research Group in the University of Glasgow and is clinical lead of the Scottish Genetic Epilepsy service. He is a Board Member & immediate past President of the European Paediatric Neurology Society (EPNS) and sits on the Board of the European Brain Council. Other roles have included Editor-in-Chief of the European Journal of Paediatric Neurology (2015-21 and Chair of the International League Against Epilepsy (ILAE) Commission on Classification & Terminology (2013-17). He co-designed vCreate Neuro, a smartphone video diagnosis and management web-application. Established in Glasgow in 2020 it is now used by >100 services in the UK and internationally.
Startup Scout & Project Officer, imec.istart
Maarten has worked very closely with early-stage digital health companies through his previous role as Regional Manager at BlueHealth Innovation Center, an early-stage Digital Health incubator in Belgium. Currently, he is the start-up scout at imec.istart, a leading tech accelerator for early-stage start-ups in Europe that has supported and invested more than 260 companies across the last 10 years.
Founder of Panakes, Diana has over 20 years of international experience in managing Venture Capital investment funds, through which she invested in over 60 start-ups across Europe. After several years of experience in the strategic consultancy sector at A.T. Kearney, Diana worked as Senior Advisor in the Investment Banking division of Lazard. In 2001 she co-founded 360 Capital Partners, a leading pan-European Venture Capital firm. She is a member of several national and international committees (EU and US) for the selection and promotion of innovative start-ups. She has also co-founded and chaired the International Venture Club, an association that brings together the main European venture capital firms. She is frequently involved as Scientific Advisor to Life Sciences conferences and acting in or chairing juries for the allocation of public funds at Italian, European and US level (i.e. Premio Marzotto, Life Star Awards, EIC H2020 and National Cancer Institute-SBIR initiative).
Convergence Partners
Daniel is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Convergence Partners, a European HealthTech venture capital firm that actively supports the internationalisation and business development of its portfolio companies in the world’s largest healthcare markets. Convergence currently focuses on investment opportunities in Behavioural Health and is in the process of launching a EUR 100m Brain Health Fund. Daniel has more than 15 years of High tech venture capital investing – and company building experience, focused on sectors that have a positive impact on planet and society. From 2009 to 2017, Daniel was Investment Partner and Investment Committee Member at Jadeberg Partners, a pioneering VC firm in European Cleantech-investing. Prior, Daniel worked for 7 years at Man Group, one of the world’s leading alternative investment management firms, in London, Chicago and Hong Kong, focused on environmental technology investments. Before joining Man Group, Daniel worked at the EU headquarters of Intel Corporation. Daniel holds an MBA and BSc in Business Studies from Bayes Business School, London (formerly Cass Business School) and is a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA).
European Federation of Neurological Associations
Dr. Orla Galvin came to patient advocacy with a PhD in Medicine and background in drug discovery and design in both academic and industry environments. Transitioning to advocacy work at the umbrella patient organisation Retina International, Orla led high impact, multi-stakeholder socio-economic studies, patient preference studies, and accessibility studies across the globe assessing both rare and common conditions.
Orla is an internationally invited speaker to both research and clinical learned societies (for example EURORDIS, EU Retina, ERN-EYE), patient organisations, and industries on topics such as:
Patient and public involvement in advocacy, research and policy,
Research in advocacy and policy/evidence-based advocacy,
Education in advocacy,
Generation of real-world data,
Patient reported outcomes, and
Health economics.
CEO, E-Health Venture
Marius started his career at the Boston Consulting Group, and then set up the digital department of Proximus Luxembourg. Since 2019, he runs Belgium’s specialist health-tech incubator E-Health Venture, which brings together health & care incumbents to support innovative projects.