The market
A $1B outcome needs 4.3% of one fragmented vertical.
Each number below is a count of practices multiplied by what one pays in a year. Nothing is borrowed from a bigger adjacent market to make it look larger.
$2.88Bgross market
178,000 US practices at an indicative $16,200 annual contract value. Recurring fee only — media runs on the practice’s own accounts and is excluded.
$1.87Bserviceable
Independent practices only, assuming 65% remain independent; affiliation is reported at 13–16% today. Small and mid-size DSOs are deliberately left out of this number even though they are buyers too, which means consolidation is less of a risk than the figure implies.
4.3%share required
7,716 practices at the same indicative figure is $125M ARR, roughly a $1B company at an 8× multiple. That would make Quadfence the largest player in this niche while holding four percent of it.
The market does not have to be won, only a slice of it. The three largest dental marketing agencies that can be put a number to serve roughly 9,100 practices between them — 5.1% of the market. The leader has 4.2% after twenty-three years and private-equity backing. Sizes and sources are on the evidence page. The engine itself does not care that the customer is a dentist, which is why small medical practices are the obvious second move: same shape of problem, different vocabulary.
Every figure on this page is sourced, dated and set out with its limits — including where Quadfence’s own assumptions differ from the published comparables. See the market evidence →
How revenue is generated
One payment to meet a practice. Then the part that recurs.
Only the subscription is ARR; the evaluation fee is not dressed up as revenue that repeats. A dentist about to sign for a practice already has to answer the question the evaluation sells the answer to, so Quadfence gets paid to find its customers rather than paying to find them. Most software companies would take that trade.
Market evaluation
Before a dentist signs for six or seven figures, somebody has to say whether the market holds up. The fee is small enough that agreeing to it takes about a minute, and roughly covers what the market data costs — so it is not where money is made. What is kept either way is a working model of that neighbourhood, whether or not the practice comes back.
The website
Built from the intake already in hand, HIPAA-ready, and the practice’s to keep whatever happens afterwards. It is given away because the engine needs somewhere for patients to land, and because a practice that has already been sold a website it cannot measure does not need another invoice.
The engine
The platform runs patient acquisition. It makes the work rather than co-ordinating it: website, landing pages, ads, images and video, all generated and governance-checked, alongside search, Google Business Profile, rankings and local presence. One subscription instead of five invoices. One practice per territory, written into the subscription. An indicative $16,200 a year; the ad budget stays in the practice’s own accounts. The figure moves once the first cohort is signed.
Two numbers decide whether any of this works, and neither exists yet: how many evaluations turn into subscriptions, and how long a subscription lasts. Finding both out is what the first group of practices is for, and the evaluation price will almost certainly move once they are known. Giving the website away is a real cost of delivery rather than a rounding error, and it is priced into the model on that basis.
Small and mid-size groups
Small and mid-size DSOs are customers, not competitors.
A group with five to thirty offices has the same problem an independent has, multiplied. Too large to run on an owner’s instincts, too small to carry a marketing department, and usually assembled by a clinician who now owns twelve profit-and-loss statements they cannot compare. One contract, many locations, one signature instead of twelve.
Because the rate is the same per office either way, consolidation costs nothing in revenue — a group’s twelve offices pay exactly what twelve independents would. What changes is the effort: one conversation instead of twelve, and a far lower cost to win each office.
The real constraint is territory, not price
Exclusivity is a per-zone promise, so a group with twelve offices in one metro consumes twelve zones and closes them to the independents who match on all three conditions. That cuts the other way too: an independent already under contract blocks a group deal in its catchment. The motion is sequenced around it rather than pretending it is not there.
None of this is in the market figures above. It is upside deliberately not counted.
The ARR ladder
Practices, multiplied by one annual figure.
Growth comes from adding sales agents on commission, not from adding overhead. The software tells each of them which practice to call next, and which ones are already spoken for.
Why they stay
Retention is structural, not contractual.
- Growth is shared. Exclusivity means a bad month cannot be made up by signing the practice down the road. The competitors are the marketing roll-ups buying up agency books, not the dental groups — those are customers.
- Everything built next sends patients to their site, not ours. The patient-facing apps in particular.
- Two years of knowing what worked in their specific neighbourhood does not come with them to the next agency.
- No annual contract, on purpose. Ninety days’ notice either way, and nothing longer. If it stops working, the practice is told so rather than quietly billed for another year.
Go to market
A profession that buys from its own, sold one territory at a time.
Dentistry is not bought through paid acquisition. It is bought through study clubs, dental society chapters, CE evenings, supplier reps and the practice next door. That is slower than a demand-gen motion and considerably harder for a generic marketing platform to copy, because the credential that opens the door is being a dentist.
- Step 1
Houston first, on foot
Sold directly, inside the profession’s own network. Greater Houston has enough independent practices to fill a year of selling without leaving the metro, and Quadfence already sits inside its professional network.
- Step 2
Texas metros, by agent
Dallas, Austin, San Antonio. One agent per metro, each owning a territory and paid on subscriptions closed and retained. Acquisition scales by adding agents, not overhead.
- Step 3
Parallel states
The same motion, chosen by practice density and state advertising rules rather than by market size.
- Step 4
Groups, last
Five-to-thirty-office groups are a different sale with a committee and a longer cycle. Taken when the single-practice motion is repeatable, not before.
The channels that actually work here
The market evaluation
A dentist will not sit through a software demo. They will read a report about their own catchment. The evaluation is the sales motion, priced so it stands on its own and converts into a subscription without a discount conversation.
Practice transitions
Every practice sale is a buyer making the purchase decision without market data. Brokers, transition consultants, CPAs and dental lenders all sit at that moment and none of them can answer the market question.
Study clubs and CE
Peer settings where a practising dentist presenting to other dentists is the format, and where a vendor presentation is not.
Territory scarcity
One practice per zone, written into the contract. The second dentist in a zone is told the zone is taken. That converts a considered purchase into a timed one.
Exclusivity caps how many practices a metro can hold, and it is better to state that than discover it. It is also the reason the motion is territory-by-territory rather than a national campaign: a zone closed is a zone that needs no further spend, and the constraint is coverage rather than conversion rate.
The same money, considerably more inside it
Priced against what they already pay. Scoped against what they actually need.
A practice paying an agency is typically buying two channels, a monthly report and a change-order queue. Everything else — a site rebuild, a video, a mailer run, a set of landing pages — is quoted separately each time. The position is not that AiRadics is cheaper. It is that at roughly the same annual figure the practice stops receiving a subset and starts receiving the whole thing.
Included, not quoted
All of it, at the one annual figure.
- Every channel, not two. Paid search, paid social, organic search, Google Business Profile, Local Services, mailers, call tracking — measured together rather than reported separately.
- The website, and keeping it current. Built, hosted and rebuilt as the search landscape moves. Agencies charge for the build and then charge again every time the ground shifts underneath it.
- Search visibility against national operators. The competitor for a local search result is increasingly a corporate group with a content budget. Standardised, governed generation is how a single practice competes with that at all.
- Creative assets. Landing pages, images, video, print. Produced by the platform, not commissioned, and therefore not a change order.
- No change orders, ever. Unlimited amendments. The phrase “that will be extra” does not appear in the relationship.
Bought at network rates, passed down
A benefit that grows with the network and that a single clinic can never buy alone.
- Print and mailer runs. A few hundred practices buying together price differently from one practice ordering once.
- Software and tooling. The subscriptions a practice would otherwise hold individually, bought once at network scale.
- Video and creative production. Where a human is actually required rather than generated.
- Merchandise and patient-facing print. The recurring physical spend nobody negotiates because each order is small.
The difference is passed down rather than kept as margin. That is deliberate: the subscription is the business, and procurement margin would put Quadfence on the same side of the table as the agencies it replaces.
$5,000what the pilot practice paid
For a website, built once. When the landscape shifted — most recently toward AI search, which reads a page differently from a search engine — bringing it up to date was a fresh quote rather than an update. That is how the category prices. Every shift is a new project, and the practice pays for the same site twice.
Includedand it stays current
Every site on the platform is generated from one governed standard, so adapting to a change in how AI search reads a page is a change to the standard rather than a project per practice. A practice on the platform does not get a quote when the ground moves. It gets a rebuilt site.
The line-by-line comparison — what the same annual figure buys today against what it buys here — is on the home page.
None of this is difficult to describe and all of it is difficult to copy, which is why it can be stated comfortably. An agency cannot include what it has to pay a person to make. A single practice cannot buy at network rates. And a competitor cannot standardise a site estate it did not generate in the first place.
The cold-start question
Why would a dental clinic fire its marketing agency and subscribe to AiRadics?
Every clinic already pays someone to do this, so the honest question is not whether they need it but why they would change supplier. The answer is split in two. Some of what makes AiRadics better only becomes true once a few hundred clinics have signed; those reasons cannot win the very first customer, so they are not leaned on.
| True from the first practice — structural or contractual | Only true at scale — real, and not pretended to be available yet | |
|---|---|---|
| Exclusivity | The competitor will not be signed. Written into the agreement. An incumbent agency cannot promise the same without capping its own revenue and dropping clients it already bills. A private-equity roll-up cannot promise it at all, having already bought agencies that serve both sides of the same street. | Group purchasing. A few hundred practices buying together get software rates a single clinic never will, and the difference is passed down. At one practice there is no leverage at all. |
| Production | No change orders. Adding a photo, swapping a video, editing a page: today that means emailing an account manager, waiting, and often hitting a monthly cap on edits. Producing an asset costs a fraction of what it costs an agency to have someone make one, so there is no cap and no invoice. That is architecture rather than generosity. | What worked somewhere else. The mix model borrows from every comparable catchment to make sense of one clinic’s thin data, and what performed in one market informs what is produced in the next. Patterns cross practices. A client’s own numbers never do. |
| Price and scope | Every channel, for what an agency charges for two. Agencies quote $1,200 to $1,500 a month to run Google and Facebook ads and nothing else. At that price AiRadics covers search, Business Profile, paid, rankings and local presence — and will tell a practice to spend less on a channel when the next dollar belongs elsewhere. An agency paid a percentage of ad spend cannot give that advice. | Machine learning across the network. The same mechanism as the row above, further out. Its value rises with the number of markets the platform runs in, which today is one. |
| Data | Their data never leaves their own cloud. Ad platforms and patient records are a contested boundary and most dental agencies are not built to think about it. The practice is set up in its own project: raw data from Analytics, Ads and call tracking lands there and stays there, and only aggregated, surrogate-keyed segments move to the hub. It is a boundary in the architecture rather than a promise in a policy — which is also why a competitor could not be handed their numbers even if anyone wanted to. | |
| People | Time with a human who knows the practice. Because the platform handles the production work, the people are spent on the practice rather than on ticket queues. |
That is also why the evaluation matters beyond its fee. Each one adds a catchment model whether or not that practice becomes a client, so the network begins compounding before the client base does. On patient data the claim is a design statement, not a compliance claim about anyone else; the regulatory position is set out on the evidence page.
Who is sold to, and how the parties part
One rate, a real qualification bar, and ninety days either way.
Independents and small groups, at the same price
A single rate whether a practice stands alone or belongs to a group of twenty. Volume does not get a discount and it does not pay a premium, which makes the negotiation short.
The comparison a group actually makes is against what they pay today. A twelve-office group typically has an agency on retainer and a marketing director whose job is to hold that agency accountable; dental marketing directors run $58,000 to $90,000 before benefits. AiRadics displaces the retainer and gives the director the channel-level numbers their job description asks for. That works at five offices and still works at twenty-five. Above roughly thirty offices a group can justify a full in-house department and the arithmetic turns — those groups also come with procurement cycles not wanted yet.
Narrow on purpose: a three-part test
A practice only counts as a competitor if all three are true: it sits inside the same zone, it serves the same primary age group, and its top revenue service falls in the same category. Two out of three is not a conflict.
A blunt promise would lock up a whole metro on the first signature. A three-part test lets a paediatric practice and an adult general practice share a zone, and lets a group of twelve be served without shutting the door on every independent nearby.
Ninety days, and it runs both ways
Either side can end the engagement on ninety days’ written notice. No annual lock-in, no automatic renewal, no penalty. Ninety days is long enough to hand over cleanly and short enough that nobody feels trapped.
A performance review is the one exception: where a problem has been set out and six months given to fix it, the engagement ends at the close of that period rather than starting a fresh ninety-day clock.
Territory stays protected
Exclusivity does not lapse the moment a practice leaves. Their zone stays closed for ninety calendar days after the engagement ends, and they get written notice before anyone in it is approached.
Exclusivity applies to active paying subscribers and to ongoing marketing only. A one-off market evaluation carries no territory rights — a practice buying a report is buying an answer, not a claim on a market.
Clients are chosen, and told why.
Marketing brings the phone call. Somebody still has to answer it. A practice that misses half its calls, never replies to a review, or will not share access to its own numbers will make the platform look ineffective — and with no track record yet, the product is what gets judged for it.
So whether the product can actually help is assessed before a practice is taken on, and the practice is told when it cannot. Where the problem is fixable it is set out plainly, given six months with support, and reviewed against the things agreed to be measured. If it has not moved, the engagement ends rather than billing continuing for work that cannot land. It is the same courtesy any employer owes: say what is wrong, help fix it, and be honest if it does not.
For an investor this is a margin and reference question, not a philosophy. Unit economics depend on the engine producing results, and the first ten case studies decide how fast the next hundred practices sign. Both get worse if money is taken from clinics that cannot be helped.