dental-ai
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Software of Excellence and the business of the empty dental chair
A missed appointment is a small hole in the diary and a real hole in the accounts. Software of Excellence built EXACT around closing those gaps. Now it is helping practices move beyond the server.
Keri McGhee’s Operating System: Make New Technology Feel Human
After turning partner marketing into a growth discipline at Zillow and customer trust into a strategy at Attentive, Keri McGhee has moved to Overjet with a tested playbook: listen closely, give teams room to fail, and never confuse automation with connection.
The $156 Million Bet That Your Dentist Needs a Second Pair of Eyes
Overjet started in the dullest corner of dentistry - insurance review - then turned that foothold into a clinical AI platform spanning X-rays, voice notes and claims. The clever part is not the colorful overlay. It is getting dentists and payers to look at the same evidence.
Johnny Chen Failed His Way Into Code - Then Built AI for Dentistry’s Least Loved Work
Two dropped computer-science classes, three bootcamp interviews and more than 140 job interviews taught Johnny Chen a useful operating system: keep moving, build the thing, and aim automation at work people already dread.
Max Bohun Changed the Customer, Not the Ambition
He spent two years teaching software to grade papers. Then Max Bohun and his co-founder made a sharp turn toward an overlooked list in every dental office - the patients who never booked again.
Florian Hillen Put AI in the Dentist's Chair - Then Made It Scale
A medical student turned MIT researcher found his company in a place almost everyone visits. Videa grew by making the machine useful to clinicians, legible to patients, and repeatable across thousands of practices.
Videa Put AI in the Dentist’s Chair. The Real Product Is Trust.
Dentists do not need another dashboard blinking in the corner. Videa’s bet is that AI wins only when it slips into the X-ray, the patient conversation and the paperwork already on the schedule.
Ali Sadat Built Retrace Around Dentistry’s Least Glamorous Problem
He learned the cost of dental paperwork from the back office, then studied the clinic and the code. Retrace is his attempt to make a claim behave less like a mystery and more like a transaction.
Retrace
Retrace is a San Francisco AI company rebuilding the plumbing of dental insurance. Founded in 2016 by dentist-engineer Dr. Ali Sadat, it operates what it calls the first natively-built AI healthcare clearinghouse - a network that reads X-rays and clinical records, compares proposed procedures against millions of adjudicated cases, and lets payers, providers and patients see coverage, cost and payout in real time so claims settle in seconds instead of weeks. Backed by Intel Capital and SoftBank, Retrace has raised roughly $18 million to automate the paperwork that sits between a dentist's chair and an insurer's check.
Arini
Arini is a San Francisco-based AI company that builds a voice and text receptionist for dental practices. Its AI agent answers patient calls 24/7, books and reschedules appointments directly into practice management software, and handles insurance and billing questions - aiming to recover the revenue clinics lose when front desks miss roughly a third of inbound calls. Founded in 2024 by Abdulrahman Jamjoom and Rami Rustom, both former engineers on Meta's Threads team, the company went through Y Combinator's Winter 2024 batch and now handles over 15,000 patient calls a day for dental groups and DSOs across the US and Canada.
Abdul Jamjoom
Abdul Jamjoom is the co-founder and CEO of Arini, a San Francisco startup building an AI receptionist that answers phones, books appointments, and handles patient communication for dental practices around the clock. A Harvard computer science graduate and former search and applied-AI engineer at the enterprise messaging company Threads, he teamed up with his high-school friend Rami Rustom - the pair met in Jordan - to attack a market they found by literally walking into dental offices and watching front desks melt down. Backed by Y Combinator (W24), Arini turns the $7B-a-year dental front-desk problem into software that, in Jamjoom's words, just gets the job done.
Avora
Avora builds AI agents for dental operations. Its agents listen to appointments, draft clinically accurate chart notes, coach providers in real time on treatment-plan communication, and surface practice-level analytics for dental practices and DSOs. Founded in 2024 and backed by Y Combinator and CRV, Avora aims to lift case acceptance and give providers back hours each day without forcing practices to hire more staff.
Shahrukh Chaudhary
Shahrukh Chaudhary is the founder of Onora AI, a Milton, Ontario startup building an AI-powered virtual front desk for dental clinics and DSOs across North America. His agents answer after-hours calls, book and reschedule appointments against live availability, run insurance checks, and chase down no-shows - taking clinics from 10 to 15 missed calls a night to zero. Before dentistry, he spent 15-plus years scaling tech businesses, including running Careem's Karachi operations and building products at Azul Code and Hoid.pk.
VELMENI
VELMENI is a Sunnyvale-based dental AI platform that uses computer vision and deep learning to analyze 2D and 3D dental radiographs in real time. Its FDA-cleared flagship product, VELMENI for DENTISTS, is the first dental AI approved to detect pathologies in panoramic X-rays — catching caries, bone loss, and other findings that experienced clinicians miss roughly one-third of the time. Beyond diagnostics, the platform automates insurance claims, enables voice-assisted periodontal charting, interprets CBCT scans, and delivers VR-based patient education, all from a single integrated workflow. Founded in 2020 by CEO Mini Suri and Chief Dental Officer Dr. Arvin Oberai, the company has been beta-tested by over 1,300 dentists across 500+ practices in 50+ countries.
Daniel Bessonov
Daniel Bessonov is the co-founder and CEO of Avora, a Y Combinator- and CRV-backed AI platform that deploys intelligent agents for dental operations - automating clinical documentation, coaching providers on case acceptance, and following up with patients. Before Avora, he architected core payment features at Ramp, built UAV encryption at Anduril, and led product intelligence at Wispr AI. A Penn M&T graduate (CS + Finance), he became a Top 25 App Store developer at age 14 and has spent the decade since compressing complex AI problems into products clinicians actually use.
Ahmed Reza
Ahmed Reza is the Founder and CEO of Yobi, an AI workforce platform that deploys synthetic agents to handle calls, texts, and social DMs for small businesses 24/7. A Milken Scholar at Cornell University who wrote image-processing software for NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, Reza went from child actor in Bangladesh to homeless student to serial entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. His previous ventures include Call Sumo (call tracking analytics) and Dental Web Now (AI dental marketing, acquired by NPI). Yobi raised a $2.37M seed round in 2023, reached $2.4M ARR by late 2025, and in 2026 partnered with Microsoft to develop a private foundation model for predictive behavioral intelligence.
Mini Suri
Mini Suri is the Co-Founder and CEO of VELMENI, a Silicon Valley-based FDA-cleared dental AI company that analyzes 2D and 3D dental X-rays to detect pathologies that even experienced dentists miss. Drawing on 20+ years at Citi, a stint building intelligent automation at Uber, and an MBA from MIT Sloan, she pivoted to healthtech after a personal brush with the cost of missed diagnoses. Under her leadership, VELMENI has grown to serve 500+ dental offices across 50+ countries with AI-powered tools for panoramic, bitewing, periapical, and CBCT imaging - aiming to bring affordable, high-quality dental diagnostics to one billion patients worldwide.