Three founders and a brave promise: every child can become a reader

Take a moment before you read on. Think of an evening at home: the dishes done, the light a little lower, a child beside you with a book open on their knees. Maybe you can already hear it — the small voice finding its way through a sentence, stopping, and starting again.

That voice is why Vokela exists.

Three people, three directions, one moment

We met at StartSchool in Riga, at our first hackathon. Three people who had never built anything together, and who, within one weekend, found that each of us had been watching the same thing from a different side: children who can put letters together into words, but do not yet believe they can read.

Dags Hofrats was born in Latvia and raised in Britain. He spent most of his life in the UK and Vietnam, where teaching English turned into a lasting passion for education. Anyone who has taught knows the moment when a hard sentence suddenly gives way — and knows, too, what it is like when nobody is there to notice it.

Emīls Timanis is a student and a rapper. He writes rhymes, so he knows in his whole body what most of us only know in theory: reading aloud well lives in rhythm, in breath, and in the courage to let your own voice be heard.

Juris Vītols studies at Riga Technical University. He keeps the plan honest and the week moving, and every day he quietly asks the one question that matters: what will actually help a child tonight?

The brave part

It would be easy to build one more app that flashes, hands out prizes and asks for more screen time. We are choosing something slower, and braver.

The largest international study of ten-year-olds’ reading, IEA PIRLS 2021, found that 21 of 32 countries scored lower than five years before. Latvia’s fall of 30 points was the steepest among its neighbours. And children who were confident readers scored 541 on average, against 449 for those who were not.

Read that last number again, slowly. Confidence is not a side effect of reading. It is part of how reading grows. And confidence can grow at home, one evening at a time.

We are not building a test. We are building a patient listener.

How it feels

Your child opens Vokela. First they hear the line, read by a calm voice. Then it is their turn. They read aloud, and each word they say lights up green. If one word is tricky, it turns a soft yellow — never red — and they can try it once more. Three stars, and the evening is done. No numbers in front of your child. Nothing to buy inside.

And you, the parent, get one sentence about how it went. Not a dashboard. Just enough to know what to practise tomorrow.

Imagine a few weeks from now

Picture the same evening a few weeks from now. The book is a little thicker. The pauses are a little shorter. And somewhere in the middle of a sentence, your child’s voice changes — you will hear it — from asking to telling. From “can I?” to “listen to this”.

That is the moment we are building for. Three founders, one stubborn problem, and a promise we intend to keep: every child can hear themselves become a reader.

Vokela starts in Latvian, with English alongside. If you would like your family to be among the first, the waiting list is open.