“My son struggled with reading. For years, no one could tell us why.”
Scott Sosso, Founder & CEO
The Intelligent Reading Specialist
The Struggle
In 2012, our kindergartener Luca was struggling to read. What followed was years of grasping for solutions that never quite fit.
504 plans that provided accommodations but no answers. IEP meetings that left us with more questions than progress. Vision therapy. Speech pathologists. Occupational therapists. Reading specialists who worked hard but could not pinpoint the root cause.
We waited months for meetings. Then months more for testing. In all, it took a year and a half just to get a plan in place.
“Through all of it, one word never crossed anyone’s lips: dyslexia.”
In Pennsylvania, schools use “unspecified learning disability” and never indicate dyslexia. So families like ours spend years in the dark while their children fall further behind. By 7th grade, Luca had lost confidence. The curious, joyful child we knew was becoming increasingly frustrated.
The Breaking Point
One night I came home and found my wife crying at the kitchen table. Luca was crying too. Between them sat a worksheet. Homework that should have taken fifteen minutes. They had been at it for ninety minutes.
My wife looked at me with exhaustion I will never forget. And Luca looked at me too. What I saw in his eyes was worse than frustration. It was defeat. He was starting to believe he was not smart enough.
“What I saw in his eyes was worse than frustration. It was defeat.”
That night, I promised myself I would find a solution. Not just for Luca, but for every family sitting at that same table, fighting the same fight.
The Discovery
One in five children has some form of dyslexia. That is roughly 12 million students. Eighty percent go undiagnosed. And 66% of all students cannot read at grade level. There are 211 struggling readers for every trained reading specialist.
Every program we found was either unaffordable, unproven, or so outdated Luca would never touch it. I sat next to him one afternoon as he clicked through a reading exercise on a screen. He turned to me and said:
“This is boring. Do I have to do this?”
I thought: if something effective, affordable, and actually engaging existed, we would have found it. It had not been built yet.
The Build
In 2021, I collaborated with researchers at Carnegie Mellon. Our research revealed a fundamental gap: every reading program analyzed at the word level. They could tell you a word was wrong, but not why. So we built phoneme-level recognition from the ground up.
That research became the foundation of LUCALabs and its three-phase cycle: Listen, powered by SoundScout. Analyze, powered by Assessment Intelligence and Insights Intelligence. Build, powered by StoryGen, JourneyBuilder, and Pathfinder.
The work attracted support from organizations that believed in what we were building. We earned a U.S. Patent for our approach. And we kept going.
CMU PartnershipNSF SBIR GrantU.S. Patent No. 12,394,332 B2NewSchools Venture Fund
The Result
Luca graduated. He was inducted into the National Honor Society. He is in college today, on the Dean’s List. This was not about proving anything to us. This was Luca proving it to himself.
The boy who once believed he was not smart enough discovered that he had been smart all along. He just needed someone to meet him where he was.
“The tough nights. Ninety minutes on homework that should have taken fifteen. The frustration. But that hard work paid off. And now I am on the Dean’s List.”
Luca currently serves as LUCA’s Brand Ambassador. His journey is the reason we exist.
A Message to Parents
I have been in that kitchen. I have seen the tears. I have felt the helplessness of watching my family suffer through something I could not fix. If you are reading this, you are not alone.
Dyslexia is not a disability. It is a different way of seeing the world. Once your child cracks the reading code, they will have access to a unique gift.
That is why we built LUCA. Not as a product, but as the intelligent reading specialist we wished had existed when Luca was five years old. LUCA listens to your child at the phoneme level, analyzes exactly where they struggle, and builds a personalized learning journey that meets them where they are. Every session. Every day.
About Our Origin
Frequently Asked Questions
LUCA was founded by Scott Sosso, a father whose son Luca was diagnosed with dyslexia in 7th grade after years of struggling without proper support.
Existing programs were either unaffordable, inaccessible, or unengaging. Scott collaborated with Carnegie Mellon researchers to build an intelligent specialist that listens at the phoneme level.
Most programs analyze reading at the word level. LUCA's SoundScout hears exactly WHICH sound was incorrect, enabling precise, patented story generation.
Luca was inducted into the National Honor Society and is now in college today, on the Dean's List. He serves as LUCA's Brand Ambassador.
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