Cameron
Howieson

An engineer's answer to a very ordinary frustration

Ask most people how they picked their dentist and the honest answer is a shrug - a name from an insurance list, a clinic near the office, a friend's offhand recommendation. Cameron Howieson looked at that same shrug and saw a problem worth an entire company. As co-founder and CEO of Opencare, he has spent years building a platform that pairs patients with a curated network of highly rated dentists across North America, on the simple theory that quality care should be easy to find and easy to book.

Howieson did not arrive at dentistry by way of healthcare. He trained as a computer engineer at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, graduating in 2010. His instincts were those of a builder: take a system that feels opaque and make it legible. That instinct shaped his first venture long before Opencare existed.

From financial statements to a first exit

Early in his career, Howieson co-founded Vuru, a stock-research tool designed to make sense of dense financial reports for self-directed investors. The pitch was clarity - compress hours of fundamental analysis into clean, readable reports so ordinary people could make informed decisions. In August 2012, Wave Accounting acquired Vuru, and Howieson joined the larger company, going on to serve as a senior engineering manager. It was a fast, formative arc: build something useful, watch it get absorbed into a bigger platform, and learn what it takes to scale software people actually rely on.

The throughline from Vuru to Opencare is not the subject matter - stock charts and molars have little in common - but the philosophy. Both companies start from the same premise: an important decision is being made badly because the information around it is a mess. In finance, that meant untangling balance sheets. In healthcare, it meant untangling how patients and providers find each other.

Building Opencare

Opencare set out to be more than a directory. The company vets the dentists it lists, aiming to surface only providers who clear a high bar - by its own account, roughly the top tier of practitioners in a given market. Patients can read reviews, compare offices, and book appointments online. Dentists, in turn, get a modern channel for acquiring and retaining patients, along with tools to manage their practices. The result is a two-sided marketplace where the product is, in a real sense, trust.

Howieson's role at the company is unusual in its shape. He joined as chief technology officer, moved into the chief operating officer seat, and ultimately became chief executive officer. Three titles, one company. That progression says something about how he works - close enough to the technology to have built it, but willing to grow into the operational and strategic problems that come with scale.

The company grew beyond its Toronto base into cities including Vancouver, Calgary and Ottawa, and expanded into U.S. markets such as Chicago, San Francisco and Seattle. Along the way it raised more than $22 million in total funding, anchored by a Series A round of roughly $16 million. That capital paid for the unglamorous work of building a marketplace: vetting providers, earning patient trust in one city at a time, and stitching together the software that makes a booking feel effortless.

Leadership when the industry stopped

No profile of a healthcare founder can skip the spring of 2020. When the pandemic forced dental offices to close to all but emergencies, a business built on dental visits felt the impact immediately. Opencare reduced its workforce, and Howieson spoke about it publicly rather than quietly. He framed the cuts as a direct consequence of the economic shock to dentistry, thanked the team he had built, and turned toward the wider community.

It was the kind of moment that reveals how a leader thinks about the people around them. His comments returned repeatedly to the team and the culture - "we have invested in building a high-performing team and culture that has helped us grow a successful business," he said, "and we are ever so grateful for their role in this." For a founder who came up through engineering, the emphasis was notably on people rather than product.

The bigger idea

By 2022, Howieson was talking publicly about the larger thesis behind the work. On the "Success Leaves Clues" podcast, he described oral wellness as something woven into daily life and personal interactions, and framed Opencare as a way to transform dental practice management while delivering value to benefits providers and employers. His phrase for the mission - untangling healthcare - captures the ambition neatly. Start with dentistry, the corner of healthcare people interact with most routinely, and make it work the way modern software should.

That ambition is, at heart, a continuation of the same idea he started with a decade earlier at Vuru. Take something complicated. Make it clear. Hand it back to the person who needs it. The industry changed from finance to health, but the engineer's conviction did not: complexity is not destiny, and a well-built system can make a hard decision feel easy.

Howieson keeps a relatively low public profile compared with founders who court the spotlight. The record he has left is mostly the company itself - a network of vetted dentists, a set of patients who found care without the usual guesswork, and a team he built and rebuilt through good years and hard ones. For someone who set out to make an ordinary frustration disappear, that may be exactly the point.

Career timeline

• 2010Graduates from Queen's University with a degree in Computer Engineering.
• 2011Co-founds Vuru, a value-investing and stock-research platform.
• 2012Vuru is acquired by Wave Accounting; joins Wave to keep leading the product.
• 2013Serves as senior engineering manager at Wave Accounting.
• 2015Co-founds Opencare as chief technology officer.
• 2018Opencare raises a Series A of roughly $16M and pushes into new U.S. cities.
• 2020As CEO, steers Opencare through the pandemic's disruption to dental care.
• 2022Discusses oral wellness and untangling healthcare on the "Success Leaves Clues" podcast.