Lexplore

Lexplore is an EdTech company that provides a comprehensive service for systematic reading development, centered around its AI-powered assessment tool for early identification of reading and writing difficulties, including dyslexia. The company was founded in 2015, although other sources suggest 2017, by scientists Gustaf Öqvist Seimyr and Mattias Nilsson Benfatto. Their journey began with a research project in 2007 at the Marianne Bernadotte Centre of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. The founders, both computational linguists, leveraged data from a longitudinal study from the 1980s called the Kronoberg Project, which had recorded children's eye movements during reading. By applying modern machine learning models to this historical data, they developed a method to analyze eye movement patterns to predict reading difficulties.

The core of Lexplore's offering is a rapid assessment that uses eye-tracking technology and artificial intelligence to analyze a student's reading ability in minutes. As a student reads two short passages from a screen, a camera tracks their eye movements—how long they fixate on words and the patterns of their jumps across the text. This data is uploaded to a cloud-based platform and analyzed by machine learning algorithms to determine the student's reading level, reading age, and other key metrics with 95% accuracy. This objective process provides teachers with real-time, actionable data, eliminating the need for more time-consuming and subjective assessments.

Lexplore operates on a subscription-based business model, targeting schools, multi-academy trusts (MATs), and school districts as its primary clients. The service is designed to be a whole-school solution, providing insights at the individual, class, school, and district levels. Beyond the initial assessment, the company provides a complete support system. The platform generates a 'sticky words list' to show specific decoding struggles and offers intervention packages like Lexplore Intensive, teacher guides, lesson plans, and leveled digital books to support students' development. Having launched in Sweden in 2015, Lexplore expanded to the US in 2017 and the UK in 2018, and has since screened hundreds of thousands of children globally.

Keywords: eye-tracking, reading assessment, dyslexia screening, EdTech, artificial intelligence, machine learning, literacy development, personalized learning, phonics, reading intervention, student assessment, Karolinska Institute, educational technology, reading fluency, decoding skills, learning difficulties, teacher resources, school analytics, cloud-based platform, reading comprehension