Podcast Ep 313: After raising €2.6m to automate dental bookings, India Healy O’Connor and her sister Portia’s business Linda AI is addressing the €10,000 monthly revenue losses from missed calls at practices.
We recently reported how Linda AI, a Dublin and London-based start-up developing voice agents for dental practices, secured €2.6m in pre-seed funding as healthcare providers seek automated solutions to manage surging patient demand and overstretched reception teams.
The round was led by London-based 6 Degrees Capital, following a relationship that began when the fund’s partners met the founding team at a female founder event in the capital. Linda AI is also a graduate of the NDRC Accelerator programme in Dublin.
“You’d be surprised by how positive people are about speaking with AI and how much they like it”
The company was founded by sisters India and Portia Healy O’Connor, both former Goldman Sachs sales and trading specialists who grew up around their father’s medical practice. They are joined by chief technology officer Lucio Tudisco, who previously built enterprise systems at Amazon, Patreon and Circle.
The missed call epidemic
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The inspiration for Linda AI stems from a deeply personal connection to healthcare administration. “Our dad’s a doctor, so we were always aware that the phone was the dominant way for people to book their appointments,” India Healy O’Connor, co-founder and chief executive, told The ThinkBusiness Podcast.
“We found that to be really true in dental practices – 70 to 90% of appointments are still booked by phone, even if online booking is available, and then 25% of calls go unanswered.”
This missed call problem represents a significant financial drain on dental practices. Clinics typically lose more than €10,000 in revenue each month for a four-surgery practice, while simultaneously failing to serve existing patients who cannot get through during peak periods.
“Even clinics with two reception staff will hit peak times during the day where a lot of calls are coming in – lunchtime, early morning, when people are on their way home from work,” Healy O’Connor notes. “Fundamentally, you’re dealing with all the people in the practice – checking in, checking out, taking payments. When all of that is going on, it can be really busy and quite stressful, and then if the phone is ringing as well.”
Linda AI’s system addresses this bottleneck by acting as an extension of front-desk teams, answering overflow and out-of-hours calls, confirming appointments, managing rescheduling and integrating directly with existing practice management software.
Measurable impact
India Healy O’Connor (CEO), Lucio Tudisco (CTO) and Portia Healy O’Connor (CPO)
Early deployment results demonstrate substantial returns on investment. Partner practices report that 25% of new patient bookings now come through the AI system, with total bookings increasing by 15% and failed-to-attend rates dropping by over 30%.
“Linda can obviously answer calls – inbound calls she’ll answer – and then she’ll also make calls,” Healy O’Connor explains. “She will make calls to patients who have not confirmed that they will attend their appointment. We can see that failed-to-attend rates have dropped by 30% when Linda’s activated. Obviously that’s massive – depending on the size of your business, even if you’re smaller, it’s in the one to two thousand euro a month savings. Larger scale, it can be in the millions.”
The technology also frees human staff from time-intensive administrative tasks. “What a lot of clinics used to do was have their human staff make those calls, which is so time intensive – that’s not a good use of people’s time,” she adds. Front-desk teams are now saving more than ten hours of administrative work per week.
Dr Annette Staunton, owner of three-site dental group Cube Dental in Ireland, confirms the operational benefits. “Linda AI integrates seamlessly with our cloud-based practice management software and phone system,” she said. “It has given us flexibility to manage bookings at weekends and after hours while improving appointment confirmations.”
The human element
Despite concerns about AI replacing human workers, Healy O’Connor emphasses that Linda AI enhances rather than eliminates jobs. “The proof is in the fact that she is bringing additional revenue or additional business to the clinics, and the clinics are maintaining their current staff,” she argues.
Patient reception has been overwhelmingly positive. “You’d be surprised by how positive people are about speaking with AI and how much they like it – the different comments that will end calls with ‘oh, that was really efficient’ or ‘I really enjoyed that conversation’,” Healy O’Connor observes.
Front-desk staff have become advocates for the technology. “They recommend her to people. If people ask for testimonials, saying ‘do you think I should include it in my clinic?’ they would say ‘yeah, we can’t really live without it.’“
Scaling across markets
Linda AI is now operational across more than 50 locations in Ireland and the UK, including several large dental support organisations. The UK market represents significant expansion potential, with over 12,500 dental practices compared with Ireland’s 1,000.
“What is nice, and probably unsurprising, is the Irish and UK markets often adopt similar technologies, work in similar ways,” Healy O’Connor notes. “So when you’re building something in the Irish market, it can be quite applicable immediately to the UK market.”
The founders’ Goldman Sachs background and London connections proved valuable in accessing larger venture capital pools. “We come from a background in finance, and we’re probably quite social people anyway. I quite enjoyed getting to know people, getting to know the different investors,” she reflects.
Strategic fundraising approach
The fundraising process required careful orchestration. “A key thing when you’re running your fundraising process is that you run a process – you’re super prepared before you go in, you know everyone you want to talk to,” Healy O’Connor advises.
“When you are fundraising, it is impossible to be on top of everything actually going on in the business side. You’re distracted. So you want to keep that period of time being distracted as small as possible.”
Christina Franzeskides, principal at 6 Degrees Capital, said the firm was attracted to the founding team’s execution capabilities and market positioning.
“Voice AI agents are transforming industries by improving operational efficiency and customer experience,” she explained. “Dentistry is an attractive sector because clinics are at full demand but held back by front-desk constraints. Linda AI addresses this bottleneck by integrating directly into existing operations.”
Future expansion plans
The company envisions expanding beyond appointment scheduling into comprehensive practice workflows. “The great thing about agentic AI is you can complete workflows basically, and it doesn’t have to be overly constrained,” Healy O’Connor explains.
Future developments include care coordination functions, where Linda explains treatments like Invisalign and dentures to patients, manages referral processes and handles supply chain logistics. “We look at Linda under broad umbrella headings – the scheduler Linda, and then how could Linda become the care coordinator Linda,” she outlines.
Patient reactivation represents another significant opportunity. “You have a huge amount of patients in your patient base, and they just maybe haven’t come back to the dentist in a while – what are smart ways you can get them to come back in?”
The fresh funding will support engineering expansion, senior sales hiring and deployment across additional practices in both markets.
For the Healy O’Connor sisters, whose entrepreneurial instincts were honed organising childhood summer discos and fashion shows, the journey represents a natural evolution of creative problem-solving applied to real healthcare challenges.
Top image: India Healy O’Connor, co-founder and CEO of Linda AI
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Listen to the ThinkBusiness Podcast for business insights and inspiration. All episodes are here. You can also listen to the Podcast on:
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