The Story of Torch Dental: Building the Operating System for Dental Practice Revenue

The Story of Torch Dental: Building the Operating System for Dental Practice Revenue

Every successful startup begins with a moment of clarity—a realization that the way things work today is fundamentally broken. For Khaled Boukadoum, that moment came while working as a consultant, watching dental practices drown in administrative chaos.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Khaled Boukadoum shared the story of how Torch Dental went from observation to execution, building software that now processes $5 billion in patient transactions annually. This is the story of how one founder’s insights into a fragmented industry became the foundation for what could become the operating system for dental practices.

The Genesis: Seeing What Others Missed

Torch Dental’s origin story doesn’t begin with a technical breakthrough or a revolutionary product idea. It begins with observation—specifically, watching how dental practices actually operate behind the scenes.

Before starting Torch, Khaled spent time in the consulting world, working closely with dental practices. What he witnessed was startling: practices dedicating 30-40% of their staff purely to administrative tasks. Not clinical work. Not patient care. Just the grinding operational machinery of figuring out who owes what and collecting money.

“What we realized is that the biggest problem in the space is actually what happens after the clinical visit,” Khaled explains. “So the patient gets the treatment done, and then we need to figure out how much the patient owes, how much the insurance owes, and then how do we actually coordinate the collection of that money.”

This wasn’t just inefficiency—it was a structural problem embedded in how dental care operates. Unlike medical providers who bill insurance directly, dental practices navigate a three-way transaction: the patient pays upfront, the practice submits claims, and insurance reimburses later. Sometimes months later. The complexity compounds with every patient, every procedure, every insurance plan.

Most consultants would have written a report about this problem. Khaled decided to build a company around solving it.

The Market Reality: Entrenched Incumbents and Fragmented Workflows

When Khaled entered the dental software market, he faced a landscape that looked, at first glance, impossible to penetrate. Practice management systems like Dentrix and Open Dental had been around for decades. They were deeply embedded in practice workflows, handling everything from scheduling to clinical records to basic billing.

The conventional wisdom would say: you can’t compete with entrenched incumbents. You’ll lose on sales cycles, integration complexity, and switching costs.

Khaled saw something different. He saw that these incumbent systems, despite their dominance, weren’t actually solving the financial experience problem. They were systems of record for clinical and operational data, but they left practices to figure out the revenue cycle on their own.

“The practice management systems are really systems of record. They’re systems that track your clinical information, your operational workflows, your schedule, things like that,” Khaled notes. But when it came to the messy reality of patient financial experience—verifying insurance, estimating costs, posting payments, chasing collections—practices were using spreadsheets, manual processes, and sheer administrative willpower.

This gap wasn’t an oversight. It was a structural blind spot created by how these companies were built, what they prioritized, and how they made money. Practice management systems focused on the clinical workflow because that’s where they added value decades ago. The financial experience problem grew more complex over time, but these platforms never evolved to address it.

That structural blind spot became Torch Dental’s wedge into the market.

The Product Philosophy: Complement, Don’t Compete

Rather than trying to replace incumbent systems, Khaled positioned Torch as the missing layer—the financial experience platform that sits on top of existing infrastructure.

“We sit on top of the practice management system and we’re really focused exclusively on everything that happens post clinical treatment,” Khaled explains. This wasn’t a compromise or a limitation. It was strategic positioning that reduced friction, accelerated adoption, and created a defensible market position.

Practices didn’t need to rip out their existing systems or migrate years of clinical data. They simply routed their financial workflows through Torch, which integrated with whatever practice management system they were already using. The value proposition was immediate and concrete: automate the administrative burden that consumes 30-40% of your staff time.

Torch’s approach to automation was equally deliberate. Rather than making existing manual workflows marginally faster, they focused on eliminating work entirely.

“Our bread and butter at Torch is really using AI to take all these manual workflows and automate them,” Khaled shares. Insurance verification that took staff 5-10 minutes per patient? Automated in seconds. Payment posting that required reading explanation of benefits documents and manually reconciling accounts? Handled automatically by AI.

The difference between 10% faster and completely automated is the difference between a nice-to-have feature and transformative infrastructure.

Building the Data Moat

As Torch scaled, something crucial happened: every transaction processed through the platform made the product better for every other customer. This wasn’t a marketing claim—it was architectural reality.

“We’ve processed about $5 billion of patient transactions over our life, which is about 15 million unique transactions,” Khaled explains. Each insurance verification, each claim submission, each payment posting fed the AI models that power Torch’s automation.

This created genuine network effects. More practices using Torch generated more training data, which improved automation accuracy, which attracted more practices, which generated more data. Competitors starting today would need years just to reach Torch’s current baseline capability.

The strategic insight here runs deeper than “collect data.” Khaled architected Torch so that data accumulation fundamentally improves the product’s core value proposition. Better data means better automation means less administrative burden means happier practices. The moat compounds over time.

The Scale Challenge: Serving a Fragmented Market

With roughly 200,000 dental practices in the United States—most independently owned—Torch faced a classic scaling challenge. How do you efficiently serve a massive, fragmented market where each customer has unique needs?

Torch’s solution combined self-serve mechanics with high-touch support. Smaller practices could onboard themselves quickly through intuitive interfaces and automated integrations. Larger groups received dedicated implementation teams for more complex deployments.

“We’re now a couple hundred practices live and definitely growing quickly,” Khaled notes. The dual-motion approach allows Torch to scale efficiently while still winning enterprise accounts that require customization and white-glove service.

This isn’t just about sales efficiency—it’s about building a product architecture that genuinely works for both a solo practitioner and a 50-location dental group. Few B2B companies successfully serve both ends of the market. Torch’s ability to do so comes from treating it as a product problem, not just a go-to-market problem.

The Future: Becoming the Operating System

Ask most founders about their vision, and you’ll get vague platitudes about “transforming the industry” or “empowering customers.” Khaled’s vision for Torch is specific, ambitious, and architecturally grounded.

“Our ambition is really, again, to be the operating system, to be that piece of connective tissue that connects the insurance companies with the patients and with the practices and sits at the center of all those relationships,” Khaled explains.

This isn’t hyperbole—it’s a roadmap. As Torch becomes the system of record for patient financial data, it naturally expands to encompass adjacent workflows. Payment processing. Patient financing. Insurance relationships. Analytics and benchmarking. Each expansion reinforces Torch’s position as essential infrastructure.

The dental industry is consolidating. New payment models are emerging. AI capabilities continue advancing. Torch isn’t just building for dental practices as they exist today—they’re building the infrastructure for how the industry operates in ten years.

“We want to be the back office, effectively, for these practices, so that they can focus on providing great care,” Khaled notes. This vision positions Torch not as a software vendor but as operational infrastructure—the platform that handles everything practices need to do but don’t want to think about.

The practices that adopt Torch today are essentially investing in that future. They’re not just buying software—they’re plugging into infrastructure that will grow more capable, more connected, and more valuable as the industry evolves.

For founders building in fragmented markets with entrenched incumbents, Torch Dental’s story offers a blueprint: find the structural problem everyone sees but nobody solves, build the complementary infrastructure that incumbents can’t, and position for the market you’re creating rather than the one you inherited. That’s how you build not just a company, but an operating system.