Our Story
DentalIQ™ runs the business side of your independent practice, so your team can run the patient side. This is how it started, and why it's built the way it is.
Walk into most independent dental practices and you'll find the same scene: a front desk coordinator on hold with an insurance company for the third time this week, a provider staying late to finish notes that should have taken minutes, a recall list no one has touched in months, and a practice owner who has no idea what their practice is actually doing because the only number they track is monthly collections.
Nobody in this industry is short on clinical talent. What independents are short on is process. DSOs run the same procedures in every office, and the owner sees the numbers every week. Most independent practices run on one office manager's habits, and on whatever she carries in her head.
"My father-in-law has spent forty-five years in the dental lab world. My extended family includes a practicing dentist, a hygienist, and two retired dentists. I know exactly what the back office looks like — and I know it's fixable. That's the whole thesis."
Robby Koolen — Founder & Engineer, DentalIQ™ LLC
Robby Koolen is a software engineer with an M.S. in Computer Science, based in San Diego. He didn't come to dental through a pitch deck — he married into it. His father-in-law is Gary Vaughn, CDT, CTO at Pacific Aesthetic Continuum — a 45-year veteran of the dental lab world, logging twelve-hour days fielding requests from dentists on lab work. His extended family includes a dental hygienist, a practicing dentist running a small independent practice, and two retired dentists. The revenue leak problem is never abstract. It's at the dinner table.
What he heard at that table wasn't a shortage of skill. It was a shortage of process: insurance questions answered from memory, recall lists nobody owned, lab cases tracked on paper. DSOs solved that with standard procedures. DentalIQ's thesis is that an independent practice deserves the same procedures without giving up its independence. Good process first. Then AI.
The goal is never to replace the humans in the room. A great dental practice runs on relationships, clinical judgment, and trust — things no AI should touch. DentalIQ handles the work nobody wanted anyway. The front desk keeps the patients. The providers go home on time. The AI takes the hold music, the untouched recall list, and the missing documentation.
Robby designs and builds DentalIQ himself: web, backend and mobile, without committees or feature drift. The platform ships every quarter. The roadmap has no finish line.
I don't come to this industry cold. My father-in-law is Gary Vaughn, CDT, CTO at Pacific Aesthetic Continuum — 45 years on the bench, working twelve-hour days to keep up with what dentists need from the lab side. My extended family includes a hygienist, a dentist running his own practice, and two retired dentists who spent decades in the chair. The revenue leak problem isn't a market thesis to me. It's a dinner table conversation.
What I see up close is that independent practices don't struggle because of the dentistry. They struggle because the back office runs on habit, and on one or two people who carry everything in their heads. When one of them is out sick, the whole practice feels it. DSOs fixed that with process. I want independent practices to have the same thing and stay independent.
I'm not building this to replace anyone. The best dental teams in the country are full of people who are exceptional at patient care and exhausted by everything else. DentalIQ handles the everything else. The humans stay exactly where they belong.
Robby's father-in-law is Gary Vaughn, CDT — Chief Technical Officer of Pacific Aesthetic Continuum and a forty-five-year veteran of the dental lab world.
The conversations that became DentalIQ happened at family dinners, not investor meetings. When Robby talks about back-office burnout, dead recall lists, or post-op documentation getting lost between the chair and the front desk — he's talking about problems his family lives with. The platform was built for them first, and for every independent practice like them.
The easiest path would have been to wrap a general-purpose AI in a dental-themed interface and call it done. DentalIQ is built differently, on purpose: the procedures and the AI were designed together.
DentalIQ began in mid-2025 as weekend work on an idea and became a full-time build. Sixteen months in, it has eleven modules on one patient record, a web app and an iOS app, and a founding program open to independent practices.
Every session adds something real, shipped to production rather than left in a staging environment. The platform that exists today is the starting line, not the finish.
Facts about the platform, not estimates about your practice.
Most independent practices run on habits and on the people who carry them. DSOs run on process. DentalIQ gives the independent practice the process and the AI together, built for them specifically: not for DSOs, not for health systems, not for the enterprise market that gets all the attention. Stay independent. Run like a DSO.
Start with the free practice audit: a short set of questions and a report on where your back office stands. Or start a 14-day trial, no card needed, and see DentalIQ on your own schedule.