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 us in a year. We haven't borrowed anything 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. We assume 65% remain independent, and affiliation is reported at 13–16% today. We have deliberately left small and mid-size DSOs out of this number even though they are buyers too, which means consolidation is less of a risk here than the figure implies.
4.3%share required
7,716 practices at the same indicative figure is $125M ARR, which is roughly a $1B company at an 8× multiple. We would be the largest player in this niche and still hold four percent of it.
We don't have to win this market, only a slice of it. The three largest dental marketing agencies we can put a number to serve roughly 9,100 practices between them, which is 5.1% of the market. The leader has 4.2% after twenty-three years and private-equity backing. Sizes and sources are set out below. The engine itself doesn't 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 our 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. We are not going to dress the evaluation fee up as revenue that repeats. A dentist about to sign for a practice already has to answer the question we sell the answer to, so we get paid to find our customers rather than paying to find them. Most software companies would take that trade.
Market evaluation — one-time
Before a dentist signs for six or seven figures, somebody has to tell them whether the market holds up. We do, for a fee small enough that agreeing to it takes about a minute. It roughly covers what the market data costs us, so it isn't where we make money. What we keep either way is a working model of that neighbourhood, whether or not they come back.
We build the website. No charge.
Built from the intake we already have, HIPAA-ready, and theirs to keep whatever happens between us. We give it 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 — recurring, exclusive
The platform then runs their patient acquisition. It makes the work rather than co-ordinating it: the website, landing pages, ads, images and video, all generated by the engine and all 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, and their ad budget stays in their own accounts. This is the only line that is ARR, and the figure moves once the first cohort is signed.
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 us 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. We sequence around it rather than pretend it is not there.
None of this is in the market figures above. It is upside we have chosen not to count.
The ARR ladder
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
- We only grow when they grow. Exclusivity means we cannot make up a bad month by signing the practice down the road. The people we compete with are the marketing roll-ups buying up agency books, not the dental groups — those are customers.
- Everything we build next — the patient-facing apps in particular — sends people back to their site rather than ours.
- Two years of knowing what worked in their specific neighbourhood doesn't come with them to the next agency.
- No annual contract, on purpose — ninety days’ notice either way, and nothing longer. If it stops working we will say so rather than quietly billing them for another year.
Two numbers decide whether any of this works, and we don't have either one 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 we have. 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.
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.
Sequence
- Houston first, on foot. Founder-led. Greater Houston has enough independent practices to fill a year of selling without leaving the metro, and our founder already sits inside its professional network.
- Then 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 by adding overhead.
- Then parallel states. The same motion, chosen by practice density and state advertising rules rather than by market size.
- Groups, last. Five-to-thirty-office groups are a different sale with a committee and a longer cycle. We take them when the single-practice motion is repeatable, not before.
The channels that actually work here
- The market evaluation as the opening. 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 exact decision our founder made without 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 as the close. 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 we would rather 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. Our position is not that we are 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 genuinely required rather than generated.
- Merchandise and patient-facing print. The recurring physical spend nobody negotiates because each order is small.
We pass the difference down rather than keep it as margin. That is deliberate: the subscription is the business, and procurement margin would put us on the same side of the table as the agencies we are replacing.
$5,000what our founder paid
For a website for her own practice, 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.
None of this is difficult to describe and all of it is difficult to copy, which is why we are comfortable stating it. 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. We have split the answer in two. Some of what makes us better only becomes true once a few hundred clinics have signed, and those reasons cannot win us our very first customer, so we are not going to lean on them.
True from the first practice
These are structural or contractual. They do not need scale.
- We will not sign their competitor. Written into the agreement. An incumbent agency cannot promise the same thing 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.
- 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 us 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.
- 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 we cover search, Business Profile, paid, rankings and local presence — and we 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.
- 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. We set the practice 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 us. It is a boundary in the architecture rather than a promise in a policy — which is also why we could not hand a competitor their numbers even if we wanted to.
- 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.
Only true once we have scale
Real, and we will not pretend they are available yet.
- Group purchasing. A few hundred practices buying together get software rates a single clinic never will, and we pass them down. At one practice we have no leverage at all.
- 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 we produce in the next. Patterns cross practices. A client’s own numbers never do.
- Machine learning across the network. The same mechanism as the point above, further out. Its value rises with the number of markets the platform runs in, which today is one.
That is also why the evaluation matters beyond its fee. Each one we run 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 we are making a design statement, not a compliance claim about anyone else. The regulatory position is set out on the evidence page.
Who we sell to, and how we 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 not against hiring someone — it 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, and dental marketing directors run $58,000 to $90,000 before benefits. We displace the retainer and give the director the channel-level numbers their job description asks for. That works at five offices and it still works at twenty-five.
Above roughly thirty offices a group can justify a full in-house department and the arithmetic turns. We are not pretending otherwise, and those groups also come with procurement cycles we do not want yet.
Exclusivity is narrow on purpose
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.
That matters commercially. 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 us serve a group of twelve without shutting the door on every independent nearby.
We choose our clients, and we say 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 give us 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 we assess whether we can actually help before taking a practice on, and we say so when we cannot. Where the problem is fixable we set it out plainly, give it six months with support, and review it against the things we agreed to measure. If it has not moved, we end the engagement rather than keep billing for work that cannot land. It is the same courtesy any employer owes: tell someone what is wrong, help them fix it, and be honest if it does not.
For an investor this is a margin and reference question, not a philosophy. Our unit economics depend on the engine producing results, and our first ten case studies decide how fast the next hundred practices sign. Both get worse if we take money from clinics we cannot help.
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 we have set out a problem and given six months to fix it, the engagement ends at the close of that period rather than starting a fresh ninety-day clock.
And their territory stays protected afterwards
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 we approach anyone in it.
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.
Every figure above is sourced, dated and set out with its limits.