Jonathan Rat

The Story

He came for the ride-sharing.
He stayed for the drilling.

Somewhere between building global payments infrastructure for Uber and helping scale Facebook's product platform, Jonathan Rat found himself doing something most Silicon Valley product managers do not put on their resumes: cleaning dental instruments and filing insurance claims at his wife's practice after dark.

His wife, Dr. Christine Liu, runs a dental practice in San Jose. And the software she used every day - the software that ran scheduling, charting, billing, imaging, and patient communication for a business serving hundreds of people - was older than most of her patients' first molars. Fragmented. Buggy. Requiring a physical server in the building just to function. Impossible to train new staff on.

"I was appalled by the insufficient tools Christine and her team had to use every day," Rat has said. For a man who had spent years making software that billions of people used invisibly and effortlessly, watching competent dental professionals fight their own tools was not just frustrating. It was a market signal.

"Most of the software used in the industry was more than 20 years old and still required physical services onsite. Most lacked integration with other platforms, were slow and buggy, and impossible to train new employees on."

- Jonathan Rat, Co-Founder & CEO, Archy

In 2021, Rat left Uber, recruited two former colleagues - Ben Kolin and Nimish Sheth - and co-founded Archy. The name is short, clean, and a little architectural. The mission is sprawling: replace every piece of software a dental practice relies on with a single, cloud-native platform.

He was not entering dental by accident. He was entering it as someone who had worked a night shift there. That distinction matters enormously in enterprise software. The founders ran a "dual-app" test for four months inside Dr. Liu's practice - using Archy and the old system side-by-side - before ever putting it in front of a paying customer. The dental practice was not just a beta site. It was a durability test.

Fast Facts

Originally from France; moved to the US in 2009
Master's degree in Computer Science, SUPINFO
Former PM at Facebook, SurveyMonkey, and Uber
Built Uber's global payments infrastructure
Taught at SUPINFO as a visiting professor
His wife, Dr. Christine Liu, was Archy's first real-world test site
Co-founders Ben Kolin and Nimish Sheth are fellow Uber alumni
Based in San Jose, California

Profile Tags

Backed By

TCV (Series B Lead)
Bessemer Venture Partners
CRV
Entrée Capital
25 practicing dentists (angels)
Instacart CEO Fidji Simo (angel)
Former Uber CTO Thuan Pham (angel)

The Opportunity

A $500 billion industry that Big Tech forgot to fix

$500B US Dental Industry

Overlooked by large healthcare platforms

200K Dental Practices in the US

~80% run by dentist-entrepreneurs

90% Still on On-Prem Servers

Physical hardware in office closets

15% Bottom Line Lost to Inefficiency

Per practice, on average

80hrs Saved Per Month

Per Archy customer, via automation

Rat's insight was precise: "I also realized bigger tech players have been building software for the larger healthcare market but overlooked the $500 billion dental industry." The dental practice is a strange and specific business. It is a clinical operation, a retail appointment business, an insurance billing shop, and a small-business accounting department - all running simultaneously, all under one roof, often managed by the dentist who also has their hands in someone's mouth.

COVID accelerated what Rat already knew was coming. When practices couldn't access their on-prem servers remotely during lockdowns, the fragility of the old model became impossible to ignore. Archy launched into that moment of reckoning.

The Product

Five apps down. One to go.

Most dental practices run five to ten separate software tools to handle everything from scheduling to charting to X-rays to billing to patient messaging. Archy replaces all of them. Single login. Single database. Automatic updates. No server closet. And as of January 2026 - a native mobile app, making Archy the first complete dental practice management platform available on iPhone and Android.

"When a patient needs you, you shouldn't have to be sitting at a computer to help." - Jonathan Rat, on launching Archy's mobile app

Archy Intelligence - The AI Team

Five AI agents built into the platform. Each one handles a job that used to require a human or be left undone.

✅

Archy Verify

Insurance eligibility verification, automated

💰

Archy Revenue

Claims filing, collections, and billing

📝

Archy Scribe

Clinical note drafting and follow-ups

💬

Archy Connect

Patient communications and scheduling

📊

Archy Insight

Practice analytics and growth recommendations

"Dental practices are getting squeezed from every direction - there's a massive staffing shortage, hiring costs keep climbing, and insurance reimbursements keep falling. We're not just building software; we're building an AI-powered teammate that helps practices do more with smaller teams, turning the staffing crisis into a competitive advantage."

- Jonathan Rat

Funding Journey

From $10M to $47M - and 25 dentists wrote personal checks

$10M

Series A

November 2022

Bessemer + CRV

$15M

Series A-2

2024

Entrée Capital

$20M

Series B

October 2025

TCV + Bessemer + CRV

$47M

Total Raised

To Date

+ 25 Dentist Angels

The Series B told its own story. TCV - a firm that backed Netflix, Spotify, and Airbnb - led a $20 million round into a dental software company. That is not a typical portfolio move. What made it less surprising was who else signed the check: 25 practicing dentists put in personal money as angel investors. That is not a PR stunt. That is the product-market fit conversation happening in real time, in people's own portfolios.

The total raise to date: $47 million. Archy's plan is expansion into engineering and AI, with international growth targeted for 2026.

Career Arc

From Paris to Palo Alto
to the dental office

Rat's path is the inverse of most dental tech founders. He did not start in healthcare and learn to code. He started in code and learned healthcare from the inside, as an employee - unpaid, after hours, motivated by love and frustration in roughly equal measure.

2009

Moved from France to the United States

2011

Lecturer & Visiting Professor, SUPINFO International

~2012-2016

Product Manager at Facebook (Meta) - built product platforms serving billions

~2016-2018

Product Manager at SurveyMonkey

~2018-2021

Senior PM of Payments at Uber - helped build global payments infrastructure

2021

Co-founded Archy with Ben Kolin and Nimish Sheth. Dr. Liu's practice = first beta site.

2022

Archy raises $10M Series A. Comes out of stealth.

2024

$15M additional funding. Platform expands across 45 states.

Oct 2025

$20M Series B led by TCV. Archy Intelligence (AI agents) launched.

Jan 2026

First native mobile app for dental practice management launched on iOS and Android.

Education

Master's in Computer Science - SUPINFO International Institute of Information Technology (France)
Visiting Professor & Lecturer - SUPINFO (2011)

Co-Founders

Ben Kolin - Co-CTO & Co-Founder (former Uber colleague)
Nimish Sheth - Co-CTO & Co-Founder (former Uber colleague)
Sarah Payne - Chief Product Officer & COO

Archy by the Numbers

110 employees at Archy
2.5 million patients on platform
$100M+ in annual payments processed
300% year-over-year growth (2025)
80 hours saved per practice per month
Active in 45 US states

In His Own Words

What Jonathan Rat actually says

"I realized there was a massive need and opportunity for a modern, cloud-based software platform and set out to build that."

"I also realized bigger tech players have been building software for the larger healthcare market but overlooked the $500 billion dental industry."

"90% of the dental industry is still using on-prem servers."

"You need to know the in's and out's of the market you are serving."

"Dentists deserve software as smart and reliable as the care they provide."

"When a patient needs you, you shouldn't have to be sitting at a computer to help."

Building Philosophy

The dental office as product lab

One of Rat's most cited principles is immersion. Archy's team regularly visits customer practices to observe workflows - not to demo software, but to watch how people actually work. When you have personally spent time in the role your software is meant to serve, you notice things that user interviews miss. You see the workarounds. You feel the frustration of clicking through six screens to confirm an appointment.

His approach to partnerships is equally pragmatic. Rather than building payroll or e-prescription tools in-house, Archy integrates with Gusto and DoseSpot. "These are complex businesses better developed separately," is the reasoning - a discipline that keeps Archy focused on the core platform rather than spreading across every adjacent problem.

On the question of vertical versus horizontal software, Rat has been deliberate. The dental practice is specific enough that a general-purpose CRM or practice management tool will never quite fit. But it is also large enough - 200,000 practices in the US, $500 billion in economic activity - to justify building something purpose-made.

He has also been candid about what makes dental software uniquely hard: dentists did not go to dental school to run software companies. They went to learn how to fix teeth. The administrative burden they carry - insurance verification, claims filing, patient communications, financial reporting - is overhead they tolerate, not work they chose. Archy's bet is that AI agents can absorb enough of that burden that the dentist can go back to being a dentist.

Building Principles

Immersive market research - visit customer sites, observe workflows
Don't build what partners do better (payroll, e-prescriptions)
Four-month dual-app testing before customer launch
Cloud-native from day one - no server closets
Single platform over best-of-breed integrations
AI for administrative tasks, humans for patient care

Adjacent Vision

International expansion planned for 2026
Sees broader healthcare as next wave of disruption
Education sector identified as underserved by modern software
Advocates for equity and inclusion in dental profession

The Details

Things worth knowing

Origin Story

Born in France. Moved to California in 2009. Now building software that powers dental offices across 45 American states.

The Billion-User Backstory

The payments infrastructure Rat helped design at Uber has been touched by billions of ride-share users globally. Archy now does the same for dental practices.

The Night-Shift Founder

While holding a full-time PM role at Uber, Rat worked evenings as dental assistant, office manager, and IT manager at Dr. Liu's practice. Market research has many forms.

The Professor Who Pivoted

In 2011, Rat taught computer science at SUPINFO as a visiting professor. He now employs 110 people to build what he once taught in theory.

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