HeyDonto closes $20 million seed round at a $200 million valuation to scale Conduit.

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — April 7, 2026 — HeyDonto AI Technology today announced the close of a $20 million seed funding round at a $200 million valuation. The investment will fuel the scale-up of Conduit, the company's dental interoperability exchange platform, and position HeyDonto to lead the integration of dental data into the broader healthcare ecosystem.

The round was led by eight leading private investors who are practicing dentists and dental industry veterans, bringing not only capital but decades of firsthand understanding of the structural data challenges facing the profession. The investment group also includes several family offices with healthcare and technology portfolios. The participation of clinician-investors signals strong validation from within the dental community that Conduit addresses a real, urgent, and long-overlooked infrastructure problem.

"I've practiced dentistry for over 45 years, and the inability to share patient data with physicians, specialists, or even another dental office has been one of the most persistent frustrations of my career. We've been operating in a silo while the rest of medicine connected. What HeyDonto has built with Conduit is what the industry has needed for a long time — this isn't a nice-to-have, it's the missing infrastructure layer that dental has never had. I invested because I believe in both the technology and the team, and I want to see this become the standard."

Conduit is the first production-grade platform that connects dental practice management systems (PMS), medical electronic health records (EHRs), payer systems, and patient access infrastructure using open interoperability standards — including HL7 FHIR R4, SMART on FHIR, and protocols aligned with the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA). The platform addresses a structural gap in the American healthcare system: the near-total exclusion of dental data from the national health information infrastructure.

"Dental data has been locked inside proprietary systems for decades while the rest of healthcare moved to open, interoperable standards. Conduit changes that. We're not replacing any existing system — we're connecting all of them. Physicians will be able to send referrals to dentists electronically. Dentists will be able to return clearances to physicians in real time. Patients will see their dental records alongside their medical data for the first time. This funding gives us the resources to make that a reality at scale."

A $174 billion industry without interoperability

National dental expenditures reached $174 billion in 2023 and are projected to grow to $266.5 billion by 2033, according to the ADA Health Policy Institute. Yet dental systems remain largely disconnected from the interoperability infrastructure that medical systems rely on every day. Physicians cannot send electronic referrals to dentists. Dental offices cannot transfer patient records between different practice management systems without fax or manual re-entry. Patient dental data is absent from consumer health applications, federal data warehouses, and longitudinal health records.

The consequences are measurable. Nearly 2 million emergency department visits occur annually for dental issues that could have been addressed in a dental office, with Medicaid covering 55.4% of those visits in 2022. The absence of medical-dental data exchange contributes directly to fragmented care, duplicated costs, and preventable health outcomes.

What Conduit does

Conduit enables four core exchange patterns through a single, standards-based platform:

• Medical ↔ Dental Exchange: Physicians send referrals to dentists directly from their EHR. Dentists return clearances, consult notes, and treatment summaries through FHIR-based workflows.
• Dental ↔ Dental Exchange: Dental practices exchange patient records, referrals, and treatment history with each other — even across incompatible PMS platforms — without fax, mail, or manual data entry.
• Authorizations & Claims: Prior authorization requests and claim submissions flow electronically between dental systems and payers, bridging legacy X12 EDI and emerging FHIR-based payer APIs.
• Patient Access & Federal Data: Patients access their dental records alongside medical data through consumer health apps and federal data infrastructure, aligned with CMS interoperability mandates and TEFCA.

Powered by patented semantic intelligence and peer-reviewed science

Conduit is powered by Axiomera, HeyDonto's patented semantic intelligence engine. Axiomera performs classification, mapping, and harmonization at every exchange point — translating data across incompatible formats, binding clinical concepts to established ontologies (CDT, SNODENT, SNOMED CT, ICD-10, LOINC), and ensuring that every exchange is semantically accurate, auditable, and standards-compliant.

The scientific foundation underlying Conduit and Axiomera is formalized in peer-reviewed publications establishing the theoretical and empirical basis for HeyDonto's core innovations, and is protected by a multi-jurisdictional patent portfolio spanning United States, European, and PCT filings — covering semantic classification engines, data mapping models, multi-model AI architectures, data harmonization frameworks, and autonomous self-healing intelligence networks.

Regulatory momentum accelerates demand

Federal policy is creating unprecedented urgency for dental interoperability. The 2026 CMS Physician Fee Schedule now includes incentives for primary care physicians to integrate oral health into their practice. Medicare's ongoing expansion of coverage for medically necessary dental procedures requires the kind of bidirectional medical-dental data exchange that Conduit provides. CMS interoperability rules — including the Patient Access API mandate, payer-to-payer data exchange requirements, and the CMS 2027 Prior Authorization Final Rule — are driving demand for FHIR-based exchange infrastructure across the healthcare system.

Use of funds

Proceeds from the seed round will be deployed to scale Conduit's exchange infrastructure and FHIR data platform; expand SMART on FHIR application connectivity with major medical EHR platforms including Epic and Oracle/Cerner; broaden PMS connectivity through HeyDonto's Synchronizer technology, which bridges both cloud-based and on-premises dental practice management systems; accelerate OHIA standard adoption and Implementation Guide development; and grow the company's engineering, sales, and customer success teams.