why veekas built allo

wait and see

When his son was about a year and a half, Veekas noticed that other kids his age were saying more than he was. Maybe he was just shy. Almost everyone Veekas mentioned it to knew a kid who hadn’t talked much and turned out fine. People told him boys talk later. Parents he trusted told him he was probably being overly anxious. Most of what he read said the same thing: wait and see.

At his son’s 21-month checkup, Veekas and his son’s mom raised it with the pediatrician. They could wait until the two-year visit, the pediatrician said, and it would likely be months before their son could get services anyway.

They didn’t wait. A parent can ask early intervention for an evaluation directly, without a doctor’s referral, as the CDC explains. So they did. Private speech therapy started within about a month, and the first early intervention session came about two months after that checkup.

He knows his family had it easier than most. There was no long waitlist, and he credits his family’s access and privilege for how smoothly things went. He doubts it would be as easy for a lot of other families.

the rest of the week

Early intervention started at 30 minutes a week. Veekas and his son’s mom pushed for more and got it raised to three sessions a week. His son loved his therapist. But even then, therapy was a sliver of the week, and Veekas kept asking himself what he should be doing the rest of the time, especially on their Sundays together.

He asked for coaching and didn’t get much. What he got was basic, like talking to his son more, and some of it ran against what he was reading. Sign language was where it pulled hardest. Veekas had loved learning ASL and teaching it to his son as a baby, and his son took to it, signing “milk,” “more” and “water” before he said them. When Veekas noticed his son wasn’t saying much, he leaned back into signing. The therapists said it did no harm but wasn’t the best way to encourage speech, and steered him toward picture boards and speech devices instead. Caught between his reading and their advice, he let signing slide at home. He thinks he regrets that now.

It didn’t help that, as a dad, he was rarely the first call. Providers tended to text and email his son’s mom. He wanted guidance he could act on himself.

He doesn’t blame the therapists. They’re busy, and they have little time to coach parents. So he decided to learn it himself.

notes that became an app

He started with articles online and found them too general to be useful, so he moved on to books and kept notes. Some of what he learned went against his instincts. He had been asking his son questions all day, thinking he was making conversation, until a speech-language pathologist told him that puts pressure on a child. The first time he really waited for an answer, it felt like an eternity. And talking in one or two words at a time, which sounds simple, turned out to be the hardest habit of all.

Those notes became Allo, which Veekas started building in 2025 with input from speech-language pathologists. He built it, he says, as “the thing I wished I had.”

what allo does

Allo is speech and language support for parents of late-talking toddlers. It rests on an idea early intervention is already built around: a therapy visit is less than an hour of a child’s week, and the rest happens at meals, in the bath and during play, so the person who can do the most is the parent. The research backs that up. A 2019 review of 76 studies found that training parents was linked to gains in how children understand language and in how they use it.

A parent starts by answering questions about how their child communicates. Anyone can try the free communication check, for children 6 months up to age 3, in a browser with no account. Allo’s screening ends on one next step, never a score, a label or a diagnosis.

From there, Allo suggests activities based on the child’s age, the concerns the parent names, the family’s routines and how earlier activities went. One might build on something the family already does, like a bedtime book. Each activity walks the parent through the steps and why they help, and most use things the family already has at home. Parents can ask questions in plain language, upload a report from their child’s provider, and see what has changed over time. And on the paid plan, Allo Plus, a parent of a child under 3 gets the early intervention steps laid out, with an official source for each, and a draft of the referral email to send themselves: the step Veekas’s family took on their own.

what he got wrong

Not everything worked the first time. An early version of Allo didn’t handle bilingual families well, and it told one of Veekas’s best friends, who is raising his daughter in Mandarin and English, that she was severely behind. Veekas counts it as a major gap. Now, when a parent says they speak more than one language at home, Allo tells them to keep their home language and use every language they speak, and each activity says which language to use. (The activities themselves are written in English.)

He is just as careful about where Allo stops. It doesn’t diagnose, it doesn’t replace a speech therapist, and it never sends anything on a parent’s behalf.

where it is now

Allo is live at allogrow.com, with a free plan. Alloparent LLC, the company that runs it, was formed in 2026. Veekas still writes and edits Allo’s public guides himself, and checks each claim against the source it cites.

He’s building it for the parent he was: worried, told to wait, and wondering what to do with the rest of the week.