Samantha Merlivat CEO and Founder

Name: GoLexic

My startup in a nutshell: GoLexic is a learning App for children struggling with reading or dyslexia. It creates short training sessions for them every day, with exercises that help them develop their reading and spelling skills. We make it as easy as possible so that children can use it at home or at school, with minimal supervision from their parents or teachers!

Our team: 

Samantha Merlivat (Founder)

Our founding history: 

Dyslexia has always been an important topic for me. I saw my brother struggle with dyslexia when we were young and I know what a struggle it is for children, and how much work it is for parents trying to find support for their child. In fact, my mother started a dyslexia institute in France over 20 years ago, after she failed to find the right support for my brother.

I used to help her in my free time, and something I realised is that the demand for diagnostics and reading intervention is so high that parents often have to wait up to 2 years to get an appointment. And these early years are key in helping children overcome their difficulty.

Beyond my family history, dyslexia is something that affects a lot of children: 1 in 5 children have reading difficulties, including dyslexia. It makes it incredibly difficult for them to do well at school and it has a massive impact on their emotional well-being.

Unfortunately, too many children lack access to adequate means of intervention. And to me the problem was clear: it is incredibly difficult to scale reading intervention. There are not enough specialised therapists and tutors, and their time is limited. That is why I started GoLexic: to take pressure off this system by giving parents an accessible alternative to reading intervention, through a personalised, digital programme. Now the App exists in English and German, it’s used by parents, by teachers and by specialised tutors so that children can work on improving their reading skills a little bit every day.

This is how our business idea transforms the content industry: 

The GoLexic App uses a structured teaching approach developed for struggling readers, and combines it with exercises that focus on training all the skills required to read and spell fluently. With traditional reading intervention, children are required to complete exercises on print manuals and worksheets. This makes it difficult to keep track of their difficulties and progress over time. It also means that parents need the intervention of a trained specialist to assess the results and determine what exercises to give next. By digitising reading intervention, we make it possible for children to work independently with an app that assesses how they read, how they spell, how they recognise letters and sounds. The app always knows where children are in the programme, and automatically assigns exercises and personalises content for them. That’s how we make personalised reading intervention scalable instead of remaining an offline, 1-on-1 activity.