Dystech is helping people with learning differences unleash their talents through the power of AI.
Meet Hugo Richard, Jim Radford, Gilles Richard & Mathieu Serrurier, co-founders of Dystech, an evidence-based online literacy measurement platform and dyslexia screening tool powered by artificial intelligence.
We sat down with Hugo to learn more about Dystech’s inception, their clients-turned-evangelists, and how they managed to stay light on their feet and pivot strategies to adapt to challenges over the past year. Excerpts from the conversation below :
What is Dystech? And what led to the inception of it?
Dystech is an AI technological startup that has developed technology which can easily assess dyslexia and reading performance by analysing someone's audio recording while they read. We actually started out as a bit of a joke or passing comment, you could say. One of our co-founders, Mathieu, has severely dyslexic kids and one day he mentioned that it would be good to have software that could potentially help his kids. As it turns out, I was dyslexic as well. And it all boiled down to a personal situation that we were really involved in. And that’s how we started thinking about how we could make something work for us and others with dyslexia.
How did you all meet? And how did you decide to work together?
So there's four of us. It’s a bit of a long story, but we all knew each other from different networks in the startup world. The way we started out was that Gilles, Mathieu, Jim and I had the idea in the back of our mind, and when I moved back to Australia, we decided to make this a reality in Australia. So we decided to go full steam ahead and make it happen, set up the company and started building the tech. So while the idea came about in early 2017, we officially established the company from a legal perspective in 2018.
What’s something that surprised you when you were building Dystech?
There's a lot of different things that surprised me. I think one of the things that surprised me was how complex the education industry was and how complex learning how to read is. Your brain is doing so many different things when you read, and yet it’s something we take for granted. For example, when you’re reading the word ‘house’ your brain needs to associate those little letters, associate ‘H’ with a sound, associate all those letters together to formulate the full word and then put meaning into it. It's actually insane when you think about it. And that was very surprising and interesting to me because I had no clue how complex reading was from a cognitive perspective.
Could you let us in on some of the biggest hurdles you’ve had to overcome since conceptualising Dystech?
Sure. The first massive hurdle for us was getting the data. When we started Dystech, the main aim for us was to be able to develop tools that make assessing dyslexia very easy. One of the theories that we put out there was that, whilst scientifically dyslexia is still a work in progress, there's still a lot of research that needs to be done, understanding the ins and outs of dyslexia and the minutest of details. We all agreed, from a global perspective, that the observable symptom of dyslexia is reading difficulty. And while we realised that we had no expertise in reading or literacy whatsoever, we were still well-versed in AI and data science.
So we said, ‘How about we collect thousands of audio recordings from diagnosed dyslexic and fluent readers, and use that data and apply AI to potentially train the model?’ so that in theory, the model should be in a position to recognise whether someone has dyslexia or not by listening to the audio recording when they read. And so, the very first step for us was data collection, and that was such a massive challenge because we aren’t affiliated with any universities. We are independent researchers that have a for-profit company. And the challenge was going through a lengthy and extensive process of getting ethics approvals as well as building partnerships with organisations and schools who supported us in collecting the data that we now have.
The other hurdle has more to do with the business side. We launched our first dyslexia screener back in June 2020 with a B2C approach thinking that parents would be very interested in being able to screen their kids. This turned out to be unsuccessful, because while we were screening children, we weren’t providing the next steps owing to lack of expertise in that area. We quickly learned from this and pivoted towards using the technology more for literacy professionals who were the ‘what's next’ step, and we supported and empowered them with the tech instead.
Those were kind of interesting challenges and hurdles that we went through.
What’s the best or most game-changing advice that you’ve received on your journey?
I think one of the most recent things I learnt is taking a macro perspective. When you want to have a 100 million dollar+ business, you need to think differently when you start. That was a piece of advice from one of our investors, that essentially you’re much better off having a product that people want to use and can’t stop using as opposed to making a whole bunch of money in the beginning. Having a product that people use and love is much more important than profit, at least at the start. And this has turned out to be quite true for us so far. That's a kind of game-changing mentality. That instead of focusing on revenue, you focus on the product which ultimately leads you to revenue.
How has the current covid environment impacted those with learning differences? And how have you responded to that?
It’s been fascinating. We had a platform for literacy professionals when we first launched, and while it was very small and poorly designed, we still had some literacy professionals using it. When COVID hit, they all called us saying, ‘How do I use the platform remotely?’ So we jumped from our couch and started implementing remote features so that people could use the platform and could get kids working with it. That's one of the things that happened.
For people with learning differences, I guess one shift that’s happened with kids being home 24/7 is that parents are able to observe their children’s behaviours and patterns more closely, which they otherwise were not able to because their kids were mostly at school. They’re now able to identify that their kids need support. Additionally, their mental health has been impacted severely, and we’ve learnt from education psychologists that the first thing that’s going to affect kids when they get back to school is the drastic shift and subsequent mental health challenges. And the way that we’ve responded to these times is not only by building features that are easy for remote use, but also by keeping in touch with our customers. Building relationships with our clients and making sure they’re aware that we are here to support them is crucial for us.
What has the response from your clients been like?
Implementing changes to make the platform remotely accessible and easy to use has benefited our clients, and us, greatly. They’ve been deeply involved in this process and have gone from being mere customers to more of evangelists, sharing the work we do and the impact we’re seeking to create. And these strong relationships have been key for us. Even though we haven’t launched a big platform yet, we already have 50+ large organisations waiting for this tech, without us having to spend even a dollar. It’s all happened organically, which is super exciting.
What’s been a major achievement for you over the past year?
One of the biggest achievements that we're super proud of is the fact that we've been able to pass our research to a reputable scientific conference in Europe. One of the biggest things for us was to publish scientific research. So now, when we talk to anyone, we can say that we’re a scientific company. We're not just selling a dream. The technology that we have is working and we’ve published work that has been peer reviewed by a scientific community. For us, this acceptance was huge. There were 700 papers and the acceptance rate was just 22%. And being an independent research organisation, when our work was validated, it was an amazing accomplishment for us.
And what’s the biggest goal that you’re working to achieve for Dystech in the coming years? What would you say is your North Star?
The biggest goal for us in the coming years is establishing the technology as a clear go-to in Australia to begin with. If we're able to establish a strong case in Australia — saying our technology is able to facilitate reading performance assessment, it’s able to facilitate screening for dyslexia extremely accurately, in a much more affordable way, and is accessible to everyone — that would be a big win.
With this technology, we've been able to combine two hours of traditional paper-based assessment into a 10 minute online reading test that an English teacher can administer easily. We've been able to lower the barrier of access and have essentially shifted the paradigm when it comes to reading assessments for recognising dyslexia. All you need to do is get your students to read some words out loud and tell us whether the word has been read correctly or not, and that's it, you've got the report instantly in 10 minutes. It's a really big game changer.
So that’s the goal for the next year or so — to establish the technology in Australia and work closely with those in the Australian education system.
And the North Star for us, well, we have a very simple milestone — we want to help 1 million children. And the way we measure that is by identifying whether or not there has been any progress between the first and next assessment on the platform. If we see progress, we know we’ve been able to help. We also reach out to the parents who’ve undertaken dyslexia training and ask for their feedback. If they say we’ve been helpful, we add that to our 1 million counter.
It's a big milestone, and when we do reach that milestone, it's going to be a big celebration for us.
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If you’re interested in using Dystech’s platform, head over to their website to register and request early-access.
By Nikita Lamba
