Many kids process language in chunks or phrases, not word by word.

But most AAC (augmentative and alternative communication) tools on the market aren’t built to recognize this communication style. This gap makes it hard for nonspeaking or minimally speaking students to express what they want and harder for speech therapists, families and others around them to understand.

Nine co-founders (six from Sacramento State and three graduates of University of the Pacific) designed GuLP, an AAC app that lets nonspeaking and minimally speaking children tap buttons on a screen to speak out loud.

Designed by speech-language pathologists, the tool allows them to communicate with whole phrases or build sentences word by word, based on their communication style and preferences. The team is also building out features for training and ongoing support, says GuLP CEO and co-founder Haley Hager.

Hager is a speech therapist who specializes in AAC. It wasn’t just one incident that inspired the development of the startup. She has matched, evaluated and implemented communication tools for more than 200 students and 50 therapists. She saw the disconnect between children’s communication needs and the tools available to them play out over and over. “Seeing these mismatches, seeing these problems within the ecosystem, was something I experienced on a daily basis,” Hager says.

The expertise of three speech therapists gave the GuLP engineers a foundation to build on, and feedback from the community also helped the team determine what would be valuable to users and speech therapists.

“Right now, we have a backlog of about 200 different things that need changing,” says co-founder Umang Vadhar. “We have two meetings per week: One of them is a check-in, the other one is asking, ‘What do we want to prioritize more? What can we ship out to people and get feedback?’”

Vadhar says they beta test new features every week to get feedback fast, and building with the community has been a key part of the process. For example, in response to feedback, the team is making sure the voice for GuLP sounds more emotive and human rather than robotic.

Co-founder Ben Duong noted that an early version of their delete button required users to hold it down to erase everything. After receiving feedback, they added a one-click delete button a week later. Another idea in the pipeline is a chatbot for guidance and training, especially useful for parents. 

The team shows a “tenacity to hustle” and a willingness to “do the unglamorous part without being asked,” according to Cameron Law, the executive director of the Carlsen Center for Innovation & Entrepreneurship at Sacramento State.

“They keep going back to customers, they pay attention to what people actually do, and they’ll change direction when the evidence tells them to,” says Law, who worked with the founding team of GuLP. “Entrepreneurship is vulnerable and hard, and they’ve kept showing up for it.”

The biggest challenge wasn’t actually building the tool, Duong says. With such a large team, the hard part was finding the time to meet and plan next steps while juggling school and work. But the effort has paid off so far.

The team has earned top honors in several startup competitions, including winning the 2026 Capitalize: Next Gen startup competition hosted by the Sacramento Kings, receiving the $10,000 prize. GuLP also won first place in the Social Impact Track at the 2026 CSU Startup Launch Competition for an additional $20,000. The team is currently looking to raise a pre-seed SAFE with angel investors, with an official launch slated for October 20, 2026.

“Something that we’ve realized and learned over time is you really can’t beat building in community,” Hager says. “I think when we build in silos, that presents its own challenges, like if we were just one engineer or one speech therapist, you’re not building with the community. But to build for all, you need to build as all.”

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