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Scientific Learning Stage: Venture Date of Investment: 1996 Web Site : http://www.scilearn.com Stock Symbol : NASDAQ: SCIL |
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In 1996, Warburg Pincus provided seed funding to a new company formed by two world-renowned researchers attempting to use their work to develop a therapeutic software product that would help children learn to read. Dr. Michael Merzenich, a leading expert in brain plasticity from the University of California, San Francisco, and Dr. Paula Tallal, an authority in the neurological basis of language-learning impairments from Rutgers University, recognized that phonemic awareness was at the core of reading difficulties faced by many children. A great number of children had been identified as having problems differentiating between, and, therefore, processing, certain sounds of speech which have similar acoustic properties. The resulting product, Fast ForWord, modifies the acoustics of these hard-to-differentiate sounds and retrains the child's brain through thousands of closely monitored repetitions until the child is able to make distinctions between these sounds at a normal level of proficiency. Employing additional groundbreaking brain science research, Scientific Learning has improved the original product and expanded the Fast ForWord product line to provide scientifically-based training on other core reading skills such as phonics, vocabulary and fluency. Today, over 100,000 children have been trained on Fast ForWord and the results, as set out in numerous scientifically valid studies, are unmatched by any other reading program. The company, based in Oakland, California, completed its initial public offering in 1999.
