The useful thing about an airport line is that nobody pretends to enjoy it. The delay is visible. The queue has a beginning and an end, and every minute between them can be counted. In 2016, while studying at Washington University in St. Louis, Colton Calandrella built his first company around that plain fact. CheckTheQ made queue-management software for busy venues, including St. Louis Lambert International Airport. Its job was to measure waiting, then help operators reduce it.
A decade later, the lines Calandrella thinks about are harder to see. They run between an appointment and a chart, a phone call and a calendar, a completed visit and a claim. They appear when someone copies information from one system into another or opens another login to finish the next step. At Barti, the company he co-founded in 2021, these quiet handoffs are the product brief.
Barti combines electronic records, scheduling, billing, phones, payments, communication, websites, and operational tools for eye-care practices. Calandrella calls the destination a “business-in-a-box.” The phrase can sound broad until you see the narrow daily irritations underneath it: clicks repeated, fields retyped, calls missed, and software that becomes work of its own.
“The best software is the kind you barely notice.”Colton Calandrella
A career built around the hidden queue
Calandrella’s route to vertical software did not follow a tidy founder script. He graduated magna cum laude from Olin Business School in 2017, with majors in entrepreneurship and economics and strategy, plus a minor in Latin American studies. He was also a first-generation college student. Years later, accepting Olin’s Emerging Leader Award, he remembered attending alumni ceremonies as a student and not imagining that he would return as an honoree.
After college, he went to Chicago with Teach For America. For two years he taught high-school math and special education at Intrinsic Schools while earning a master’s degree in teaching. A classroom does not resemble an airport terminal, but it makes systems visible in its own way. A lesson has a sequence. Attention moves unevenly. The plan only works when it makes sense to the people expected to use it.
In 2019 he joined Bain & Company as a management consultant and intrapreneur. His work included software supporting organizational transformations at large companies. Inside the firm’s Baincubator, he also launched an AI venture. This was AI before the term became mandatory decoration for a software pitch. More important, it placed him inside the uncomfortable distance between a clever tool and the organization that has to adopt it.
The common thread is not a particular industry. It is a way of looking. Find the delay. Understand who experiences it. Then redesign the path through the system. Calandrella describes himself as a “serial builder who loves integrating business with social impact.” Teaching, consulting, and company-building each gave that idea a different operating environment.
The extra login is the opportunity
Barti began with a complaint Calandrella says the founding team heard repeatedly from eye doctors: their core software demanded too much documentation and too many separate tools. The company paired his software and strategy background with the experience of co-founder Kelly Cai, an optometrist. Barti says more than 30 eye-care providers have contributed to its design.
That combination matters because the interesting part of vertical software is rarely the database alone. It is the accumulated specificity of the work. Scheduling changes a chart. A chart affects billing. A call may become an appointment. A payment belongs with a record. If each step sits in a separate product, every handoff asks a person to act as the integration layer.
Calandrella’s answer is to collapse the handoffs. Barti’s platform brings clinical, operational, and financial workflows into one place, with AI applied inside that connected system. Its products include an AI scribe, a native phone system, communications, payments, and workflow automation. The point is not to place a chatbot beside old software. It is to use the context already moving through the practice.
A connected product also has to accept a less glamorous responsibility: the mundane parts must work together. A scheduling feature cannot be treated as a separate island if the appointment creates the chart. A phone tool is more useful when the call and the person’s record share context. Billing automation depends on what happened earlier in the workflow. Barti’s product argument is therefore architectural. Intelligence becomes more useful when the system already understands how one ordinary action leads to the next.
In 2024, AOAExcel, the for-profit subsidiary of the American Optometric Association, made Barti its first direct investment in an electronic-record company. By the time Barti announced its Series A the following August, the company said it had onboarded more than 200 practices over three years. Five Elms Capital led the $12 million round, with continued backing from AOAExcel, Vertical Venture Partners, Bienville, and Zag Capital.
Calandrella’s public targets are expressed in work units, not abstractions: fewer systems, fewer clicks, and more than 80 percent of routine administrative tasks automated over time.
The discipline of disappearing
Software people are rewarded for showing what a product can do. Calandrella keeps describing the desired experience in reverse: the software should create less friction and fade into the background. That is a demanding standard. A product can disappear only after its makers understand the user’s sequence well enough to stop interrupting it.
His own history suggests where that standard came from. CheckTheQ could not improve a wait without first measuring it. A teacher cannot assume that presenting a lesson means every student can follow it. Transformation software at Bain had to survive contact with large organizations. In each case, the builder’s idea meets a live system full of people, habits, and constraints. Elegance is not what the product looks like in isolation. It is how little confusion the product adds once real work begins.
This also explains Barti’s focus on independent practices. Calandrella has said he is especially inspired by helping those businesses compete with large chains. His message at an American Optometric Association conference was similar: independents need access to the same current technology as much larger operators. The aspiration is commercial and structural at once. Make the small organization operationally capable without asking it to assemble a large organization’s software department.
One system, four kinds of handoff
The Series A gives Barti room to deepen that bet. The company said it would grow its team, expand its go-to-market work, develop new AI capabilities, automate more workflows, and move further into ophthalmology. Calandrella has described agents that could handle calls, assist with inventory and pricing, work on insurance claims, and support image analysis. His stated goal is for the tools to automate more than 80 percent of routine administrative work.
Targets that large deserve scrutiny, but the framing is useful. It turns an airy promise about transformation into tasks that can be watched: did the phone get answered, did the information land in the right place, did the claim move, did a staff member avoid re-entering the same data? A founder can say “AI” in a sentence. An operator has to say what happens next.
“Our goal has always been to provide a business in a box for modern eye care practices.”Colton Calandrella
The builder returns to the room
There is a small symmetry in Calandrella returning to Washington University for the 2026 Emerging Leader Award. He credited his father with bringing him to business meetings while he was growing up. The meetings made entrepreneurship look like a job worth having. At Olin, he learned to keep the whole system in view, to look at the forest without losing the trees.
His record also contains lighter evidence of temperament. Sharing a Barti video cut with the exaggerated energy of a Gen Z intern, he told his network that roasting him was the love language of his friends and family. The joke works because founder communication can become painfully polished. A little willingness to be the punchline is a useful counterweight.
Calandrella is still early in the larger project he describes. Barti is expanding its product, hiring, and trying to carry a connected system into more practices. Yet the career behind it already offers a compact lesson. The airport queue was obvious. The later queues are embedded in software, institutions, and routines. Progress begins by making them visible again.
Good operators often notice what everyone else has accepted as normal. Good builders then remove enough of it that the old process becomes difficult to remember. If Barti works as Calandrella intends, its success will feel less like another technology arriving and more like several small interruptions quietly leaving the room.