Funding will accelerate the deployment of the first standards-based interoperability platform connecting dental systems to the rest of healthcare, backed by founding membership in the Oral Health Interoperability Alliance and a multi-patent semantic intelligence portfolio.

KNOXVILLE, TN / ACCESS Newswire / April 7, 2026 / HeyDonto AI Technology (VMC MAR COM Inc. DBA HeyDonto) 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."

Dr. Sheldon Seidman, DDS, Smile Chicago - Lead Investor, HeyDonto SEED Round

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. And having this caliber of dental practitioners invest alongside us-people who have lived this problem every day for decades-tells us everything about the market timing. We are building the interoperability layer that dental has never had, and we're doing it now."

Rivers Morrell, CEO and Founder, HeyDonto AI Technology

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 entirely 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. This is not simple data movement; it is intelligent translation at scale.

The scientific foundation underlying Conduit and Axiomera is formalized across seven peer-reviewed publications, including work published in or under review at Elsevier and Nature Digital Medicine. These papers establish the theoretical and empirical basis for HeyDonto's core innovations: deep learning optimization for large-scale data processing, quantitative semantic intelligence, multi-scale scientific intelligence architectures, self-evolving AI with metabolic processing and recursive self-representation, federated multi-institutional learning, semantic analysis systems, and quantum-informed data harmonization. Taken together, they constitute one of the most rigorously documented scientific foundations in the AI-native healthcare data infrastructure space.

That science is protected by a robust, multi-jurisdictional patent portfolio spanning United States, European, and PCT filings. The portfolio covers the full technical stack-from semantic classification engines and data mapping models to multi-model AI architectures, data harmonization frameworks, and autonomous self-healing intelligence networks. Every major capability embedded in the Conduit platform has corresponding intellectual property protection, creating a defensible moat that competitors cannot easily replicate. The combination of peer-reviewed scientific validation and broad patent coverage positions HeyDonto's technology as both academically credible and commercially protected at every layer of the stack.

Active Member of the Oral Health Interoperability Alliance

HeyDonto is an active member of the Oral Health Interoperability Alliance (OHIA), a multi-sector coalition of dental, medical, and technology organizations working to make oral and medical health information easier to share securely using open standards. OHIA was founded in 2025 with the purpose to make health care simpler, safer, and more connected - for patients, dental and medical providers, and other care team members. Members are committed to transforming oral and medical health care by making clinical and claims information easy to share securely across electronic health systems, leveraging open standards and a commitment to implementation.

HeyDonto participates in all active workgroups, contributing to discussions and testing of standards and best practices that connect dental and medical data so patients, providers, and payers can coordinate care more effectively.

"Participation in OHIA reflects a commitment to advancing open, standards-based dental-medical data exchange. We welcome the organizations that bring that commitment to our workgroups."

Mark Marciante, Facilitator, Oral Health Interoperability Alliance

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. Conduit is the only production-grade platform purpose-built to meet these requirements for the dental industry.

Kim Diamond Named President and General Manager of Conduit

To lead Conduit's commercial expansion, HeyDonto has appointed Kim Diamond as President and General Manager of Conduit.

Kim Diamond joins Conduit from a career that spans more than two decades at the intersection of dental technology, enterprise sales, and ecosystem partnerships. She spent 16 years at Henry Schein in senior leadership roles including Vice President of Business Development, where she led the company's DSO and multi-site practice strategy, and Vice President of Customer Delivery, where she built the operational infrastructure to support enterprise-scale technology adoption across thousands of dental practices.

Diamond's appointment gives Conduit one of the most commercially experienced leaders in the dental industry at precisely the moment the platform moves from build to market.

"Healthcare doesn't need another tool, it needs a foundation where data finally moves with the patient - and that's what we're building at Conduit. I've spent my career seeing where the system breaks, and this is the first time I've seen a path to truly fix it in a way that improves patient care, empowers clinicians, and drives real business outcomes."

Kim Diamond, President and General Manager, Conduit

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.

About HeyDonto AI Technology

HeyDonto AI Technology (VMC MAR COM Inc. DBA HeyDonto) is an AI-native data intelligence company headquartered in Knoxville, Tennessee. The company's platform resolves the hardest problem in healthcare data-meaning-through patented, peer-reviewed semantic intelligence that makes data interoperable, harmonized, and AI-ready before it reaches any downstream system. HeyDonto's products include Axiomera (enterprise semantic intelligence and harmonization), Atlas (multi-location data operations and analytics), and Conduit (the dental interoperability exchange). HeyDonto is a founding member of the Oral Health Interoperability Alliance and holds a multi-patent intellectual property portfolio with seven peer-reviewed scientific publications.

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HeyDonto AI Technology
press@heydonto.com
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SOURCE: HeyDonto