X-rays and prescription records taken at a dental office usually stay within that office. When a primary care physician or surgeon treating the same patient wants to see the dental side of the picture, they often have to request it separately by phone or fax. Tennessee-based startup HeyDonto AI Technology has raised roughly $20 million in seed funding for Conduit, software that links the two.
The round included eight individual investors, among them practicing dentists and dental industry veterans, along with a family office that has invested in healthcare and technology. It valued the company at roughly $200 million, according to dental trade publication Oral Health Group.
Dental and Medical Records, Kept Apart
According to the American Dental Association's Health Policy Institute, annual U.S. dental spending reached $174 billion in 2023 and is projected to grow to $266.5 billion by 2033. Despite that, dental records have been locked inside each practice's own proprietary system for decades, even as other parts of the healthcare system have already moved to open standards, according to HeyDonto founder and CEO Rivers Morrell. The same data shows that roughly 2 million emergency room visits a year are related to dental conditions, and Medicaid covered 55.4% of them. The company attributes the rise in ER visits to the fact that dentistry and medicine cannot exchange information to coordinate a patient's condition ahead of time.
Conduit's Four Functions and Where the Funding Goes
Dr. Sheldon Seidman, who led this round, has practiced dentistry for 45 years. "I've practised dentistry for over 45 years, and the inability to share patient data ... has been one of the most persistent frustrations of my career," he said. Conduit uses open healthcare data standards such as HL7 FHIR R4 and SMART on FHIR to bundle four functions together: physicians electronically referring patients to dentists and dentists sending results back, moving patient records between dental practices, handling prior authorizations and insurance claims, and letting patients view their dental and medical records on a single screen. The funding will be used to expand integrations with electronic health record vendors Epic and Oracle Cerner, and to broaden compatibility with dental practice management software.
How It Differs From Korea's Government-Led Health Information Exchange
Korea is tackling the same problem quite differently. According to the Ministry of Health and Welfare, as of February 2026 more than 10,332 medical institutions were participating in its "medical record exchange" program, and the government is also building a "Health Information Highway (My Healthway)" that lets individuals gather and view these records themselves. In the United States, a private startup raised funding to build dental-medical interoperability from the ground up; in Korea, the government has already laid a road spanning essentially all medical institutions, and participants join that existing system. However, publicly available materials do not specify how many dental clinics are actually part of this program.
Where Dentio, a Swedish startup covered earlier, used AI to replace phone reception and billing work at the dental front desk, HeyDonto is aiming beyond the walls of the dental office, at interoperability with the healthcare system as a whole. HeyDonto currently operates only in the U.S. market, so Korean dental clinics or patients won't be using Conduit anytime soon. Still, how seamlessly dental records blend with whole-body health information is a challenge both countries will eventually have to solve.