Built by People Who
Saw the Problem Firsthand

The Founding Story

A Problem Worth Solving

Oral reading fluency assessments are one of the most reliable tools a teacher has. The research is clear — regular ORF checks catch struggling readers early and give teachers real data to act on. The problem is the process. A teacher pulls one student aside, listens carefully, tracks every error on a paper form, counts words per minute, records the result, and moves to the next student. With a full classroom, that can mean hours of assessment time every few weeks — hours that could be spent actually teaching.

Ben saw this up close through a family connection in education and couldn't shake the question: why is this still done entirely by hand? Speech recognition technology had gotten accurate enough to transcribe a child reading aloud. The AI to detect fluency patterns existed. What didn't exist was a simple, classroom-ready tool that put it all together in a way teachers could actually use.

He started building PhonoFlow, and brought in Madelyn — who understood the classroom side of the equation — to make sure it solved the right problem in the right way. The result is an app that handles the tedious part of ORF assessment automatically, so the teacher's attention stays on the student, not the stopwatch.

We're a small team, and we're early. But the problem is real, the technology works, and the teachers we've worked with have made it very clear that this is time they want back. That's enough for us.