KITE THERAPY STARTED HERE

Kite Therapy provide neuro-affirming care for kids with autism and developmental delays

Rachelle Dunstan, Matthew Morrison and Gregor Whyte are the co-founders of Kite Therapy, a startup on a mission to help Australian families access affordable, empowering support for children with developmental delays and autism.

“In Australia today, we have a chronic shortage of allied health therapists; the costs of intensive therapy can exceed $200k a year, and in regional Australia, there are often no services at all,” says Rachelle.

“It’s common for families to spend years on waitlists to access support and miss their children’s critical windows of development. The access to quality, holistic and timely therapy ensures a child can flourish to the best of their potential.”

“Because of high costs or where they lived, families were not able to support their children’s development. So we have developed a model that democratises access to therapy by equipping families with the tools and strategies used by the world’s best early childhood therapists.”

While most services have therapists working directly with a child, Kite uses a ‘train the trainer’ model, coaching parents and caregivers to embed simple naturalistic therapies into the family’s existing routines.

The clinical evidence behind this approach is strong – after all, parents are their child’s most important teacher and spend dozens of hours with their child each week.

Secondly, rather than just working on one dimension of early childhood development, such as speech, Kite works on multiple dimensions concurrently, including communication, social skills, motor skills, and positive behaviours.

“Kite’s caregiver-led model can achieve remarkable outcomes with each hour of coaching unlocking dozens of hours of therapy at home led by the parent or caregiver,”  Rachelle says.

“The neuro-affirming model collaboratively sets goals with the principles of building independence and improving quality of life.”

Tackling a global need

New entrants with developmental delay and autism account for 70 per cent of the total new entrants into the NDIS, costing the scheme $5.27bn last year, an increase of 28% from the year prior.

Josh Masters, the former Chief Strategy Officer at disability startup Hireup, said innovative startups like Kite Therapy will help the scheme keep up with growing demand.

“When people with disability and their families are at the heart of service design, exciting things happen. Kite Therapy’s unique service model is driving better outcomes, at lower cost, while increasing choice and control for its clients,” he said.

“Because the team has also overcome barriers to scaling faced by existing therapy solutions, their model can meaningfully address NDIS sustainability here in Australia, but also a global need. “

Scaling fast

At LaunchVic, we first came across Rachelle as a founder to watch in August 2023 through the F4: Female Founders program, a pre-accelerator funded by LaunchVic to encourage more Victorian women to pursue their startup ideas.

By December Kite Therapy had not only registered as a new business but secured pre-seed investment from Flying Fox Ventures, an angel network funded by LaunchVic.

Rachelle is now a graduate of the Summer cohort of Startmate, also funded by LaunchVic and widely regarded as one of Australia’s best-performing startup accelerators with alumni like Amber Electric, Great Wrap and Swoop Aero.

And, with the Alice Anderson Fund’s support to close out her raise, the latest funding round will see Kite hire more therapists to support even more families with quality neuro-affirming care.

STARTUPS
START HERE