COMPANY

Name: Speeko

Legal: Speeko, Inc.

Location: Greater Chicago Area, IL

Founded: 2018

Founder(s): Anthony Pham, Nico Aguilar, Will Field-Thompson

Website: https://www.speeko.co/

Social Media: 279 followers Twitter, 61 likes Facebook

Reviews: 4.8 (154 ratings) on Apple Store

INDUSTRY – Education App

Size: 3.5Bn (2017) (Source: “Education Apps 2018 Global Market”)

Projections: $4.6Bn by 2022

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Introduction

Speeko is a public speaking app that claims to create a personalized training program in speech-making, business communication, and corporate confidence. Speeko claims that a daily five minutes of use can help users dramatically improve their speaking skills, with the help of ‘speech analytics’ and personalized feedback driven by AI.

Using speaking exercises that record your voice, analyze your pacing, tone, and vocabulary, Speeko divides your speaking style into a number of quantified categories, showing you how to improve in each with a number of verbal techniques and practices. The exercises are supposed to give you communication skills to persuade people in all walks of life, from the boardroom, to — as the app specifies — your very own ‘I Have A Dream’ speech if you desire to march on Washington, D.C for racial equality.

The Product

The app processes your voice after you speak into your phone, assessing your skills and generating an automated curriculum to help you with your personal speaking problems. This can be anything from speaking too quickly, speaking too much in a monotone, or using too many fillers such as ‘likes’ or ‘ums.’

Downloading the app itself is free, but full access means paying $11.99 a month or $106.99 a year. Paying the subscription provides access to a coaching library, full of lessons and tips which are curated based on your measured performance across metrics such as pace, eloquence, pausing, intonation, articulation, and power.

The app processes your voice when you speak into the phone, and use AI to analyze your performance. The company claims that the results provide the exact information you need to speak convincingly, clearly, and in a dynamic way that will prevent the listener’s attention from wandering.

Origin and Founding Team

The company was co-founded by three people: Anthony Pham, Nico Aguilar, and Will Field-Thompson. Aguilar works as the current CEO of Speeko. Before co-founding Speeko he worked as a manager at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. He has also worked in a number of research labs and a number of apps that concerned health and safety, such as one on child-proofing devices. He holds a Master’s in public health from the University of Iowa

Field-Thompson, meanwhile, is the CTO at Speeko, receiving his B.A. in computer sciences from the University of Chicago, after which he worked for an app called Cartwheels.

The third co-Founder, Pham, also comes from a public health background. He received his MD from the University of Iowa and has a Masters in Public Health from the same university before becoming Chief Product Officer at Speeko.

Performance and Trends

In July, 2018, Speeko raised $100K in its pre-seed fund from the Boulder-based tech accelerator Techstars.