Built in a dental practice. Not a Silicon Valley garage.
dentdial started inside a working UK dental practice, by a practice owner who got fed up watching missed-call reports pile up on Mondays.
Most dental software is built by engineers who’ve never worked a Saturday morning emergency clinic. We started the other way round.
The founder runs two NHS-and-private dental practices in Lancashire. Over a couple of years, the same problem kept recurring: every Monday, the call log showed 30–60 missed calls from Friday evening through Sunday night. Each one was a real patient — usually in pain — who eventually rang a competitor. Not because the practice didn’t care, but because reception teams are human and humans need to sleep.
The off-the-shelf options were grim. Generic “AI receptionists” that couldn’t spell periodontal, couldn’t read a Dentally diary, and definitely couldn’t triage an avulsed central incisor at 11pm. So we built our own. Then practices we knew asked if they could buy it.
That’s dentdial.
What we believe
- Reception is clinical-adjacent. The first phone call shapes the whole patient experience. It deserves better than a generic call answering service.
- Automation should free reception teams, not replace them. Your reception staff are good at the empathy and complexity. We handle the volume and the after-hours.
- UK dentistry has UK rules. CQC, GDC, ASA, ICO, NHS contracts, FP17s, UDA bands. A US-built product can’t reason about any of that.
- Pricing should be boring. No per-minute meters. No setup fees. No “contact us” buttons hiding the real number.
Who we are
A small UK team — a practice owner (still clinical), two engineers, a clinical advisor (registered dentist, 19 years), and a part-time GDPR consultant. Based in the North West, hiring across the UK.
Backed by
Bootstrapped. Funded by the founder’s practices. No outside investors yet — and no plans to take any while the product is in early access.
Hiring
We’ll post roles here when we have them. If you’re an engineer, a clinical voice designer or a customer success lead with a dental background, write to our contact form.