Barti is trying to make the eye exam faster to write down.

One system, instead of ten

Barti sells eye care practices a single piece of software to replace the many pieces they were already paying for.

Optometrists and ophthalmologists have long run their offices on a stack of separate tools - one for clinical charting, another for scheduling, another for billing, another for the office phone line, another for patient reminders. Barti's founders counted more than ten of these disconnected systems in a typical practice. Their product folds charting, scheduling, billing, payments, VoIP phones and even a practice's website into one platform.

The company was co-founded in 2021 by Colton Calandrella, a former Bain & Company consultant, and Dr. Kelly Cai, a practicing optometrist since 2018. That pairing shows up in the product: a business operator who understands software economics, and a clinician who has sat through the actual exam-room friction the software is meant to fix.

100 clicks to write down one exam

Barti's founders point to a specific number when explaining why they started the company: legacy eye care EHR systems can require more than 100 clicks to document a single exam. Multiply that across a full day of patients and the arithmetic becomes the actual complaint doctors raise most - not the quality of care, but the paperwork surrounding it.

The company built its answer with input from more than 30 practicing eye care providers before releasing it broadly, then layered in an AI scribe that drafts the clinical chart while the doctor is still in the room with the patient. Barti reports that practices using the platform have seen a 12% increase in patient volume and roughly 2.5x productivity gains, though these are self-reported figures rather than independently audited results.

Why eye care specifically

Eye care is a specialty with its own vocabulary, exam structure and billing codes - myopia management, vision therapy, dry eye treatment - that general-purpose medical EHR platforms were never built around. Colton Calandrella has described it as "one of the last sectors of healthcare still burdened with legacy systems," a gap that made room for a vertical-specific product rather than a generic one.

Who pays, and against whom

Barti sells directly to independent eye care practices as a business-to-business subscription, competing against a set of established, single-purpose optometry EHR vendors as well as general medical EHR platforms adapted for eye care. Its differentiation is less about any one feature and more about consolidation: fewer logins, fewer vendors, one bill.

That approach has attracted an unusual kind of validation. Barti is the first company AOAExcel - the for-profit investment arm of the American Optometric Association - has ever put money into. A professional trade association investing in a vendor its own members will use is a notable signal that the pain point Barti is targeting is broadly recognized within the profession, not just a founder's pitch-deck assumption.

The Series A

In August 2025, Barti announced a $12 million Series A led by Five Elms Capital, with participation from Vertical Venture Partners, Zag Capital, Bienville Capital and AOAExcel. Combined with earlier funding first reported in November 2022, the company's total raised stands at roughly $16.5 million. The round is earmarked for scaling go-to-market efforts, growing the team, and expanding the AI product line into ophthalmology.

How Barti got here

Achievements so far

Common questions

Read more

• → barti.com - Official website
• → LinkedIn - Company page
• → Facebook - @bartisoftware
• → PR Newswire - Series A funding announcement
• → Axios Pro - Deal coverage
• → Vision Monday - Industry trade coverage
• → Healthcare Tech Outlook - Company of the Year feature