We built DentNode because we saw what the problem actually looked like.

In 2022, Raman Choudhary spent three months visiting dental labs across Jaipur, Delhi, and Mumbai. Not to sell anything — just to watch. What he saw was the same story everywhere: a lab owner managing cases on WhatsApp, invoices in a notebook, staff attendance on paper, and a payment situation that made the accountant visibly uncomfortable.

The labs were doing good work. The technicians were skilled. The owners were sharp. The software was the problem. The options on the market were built for generic manufacturing, or for Western labs with workflows that didn't match how Indian labs operate — differently structured pricing, GST compliance, WhatsApp as the primary communication channel, fielders who deliver on bikes, and dentists who prefer a phone call to a portal.

The first lab

The first lab to use DentNode was Smile Dento Craft in Jaipur, in March 2023. Pawan Choudhary, the owner, had been running a 12-person lab on WhatsApp and Excel for six years. He agreed to try DentNode because he was losing track of cases — not failing the work, just losing the paperwork.

The first version of DentNode was embarrassingly simple: case entry, a status board, and basic invoicing. No AI. No WhatsApp integration. No scanner connectivity. Just a database that kept track of what was where. Pawan said it saved him two hours a day. That was enough.

What we learned fast

Three things became obvious within the first 6 months:

• WhatsApp wasn't going away. Dentists communicate on WhatsApp. Fighting that is wrong. The answer is to connect DentNode to WhatsApp, not ask dentists to use a new app.
• GST compliance was a daily pain point. Every accountant we talked to had the same story: three days a month reconciling UPI payments against invoices, then uploading to GSTN manually. This was obviously automatable.
• The scanner-to-case gap was costing real money. A lab receiving iTero scans was manually re-entering case details. Every re-entry is a potential error. Every error is a potential remake. We had to close that gap.

LabyAI

LabyAI came from a conversation with a senior technician in Jaipur who had been checking margins by eye for 18 years. He caught an error in a scan at 9pm on a Friday that would have cost the lab ₹4,000 in a remake. He said: “I won't always be here. Someday it'll be someone less experienced who misses this.”

LabyAI was built to be that second set of eyes — trained on 80,000+ real lab cases, running automatically on every scan that comes into DentNode, flagging margin errors, occlusion problems, and design clearance issues before work begins.

Where we are now

200+ labs. 2,400+ connected clinics. ₹10 crore in invoices processed. 80,000+ cases through the system. A team of 12 people, all based in Jaipur.

We're expanding — Nepal, Sri Lanka, UAE, Philippines. The dental lab problem is not unique to India. WhatsApp-native, GST-equivalent tax compliance, fielder delivery networks — the pattern repeats across South Asia and Southeast Asia.

We're still visiting labs. Still watching. Every product decision at DentNode starts with a lab owner, a technician, or an accountant who showed us something we hadn't understood yet.