The Story of Sikka: Building Infrastructure for Healthcare’s Ignored Trillion-Dollar Market

The Story of Sikka: Building Infrastructure for Healthcare’s Ignored Trillion-Dollar Market

Semi-retirement lasted exactly as long as it took Vijay’s wife to open a dental practice.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Vijay Sikka, CEO and Founder of Sikka, a retail healthcare technology platform that’s raised over $30 million, shared how an unexpected detour through his wife’s dental office revealed a massive market opportunity that Silicon Valley had completely ignored. What started as helping optimize $50,000 in fees became a platform serving 45,000 practices, processing a billion transactions daily, and reimagining how an entire industry operates.

This is the story of building in the spaces everyone else overlooks.

The Lakeside House and the Unexpected Pivot

After selling his second company, Vijay had earned his rest. He and his wife bought a house in Morgan Hill with views overlooking a lake and city lights—the kind of place where successful tech entrepreneurs settle into their next chapter.

Then his wife, a dentist, decided to jump into practice ownership. Vijay offered to help. Her response set the tone: “so long as you stay out of my way.”

He didn’t stay out of the way. Instead, Vijay spent two years working as an office manager, doing the unglamorous work of running a small business. He mapped every process, watched every inefficiency, and studied how the practice actually operated day-to-day.

What he discovered was a structural problem that transcended any single practice. “Dental offices are kind of like reverse pyramid,” Vijay explains. “The person who is the most qualified is also doing the work. I mean, if he or she doesn’t show up in the practice that day, the practice does not make any money.”

The entire business model depended on the one person least equipped to handle business operations. Dentists spend their lives learning clinical skills, then suddenly find themselves managing payroll, negotiating with insurance companies, and optimizing revenue cycles. “People who are managing are two years out of high school or vocational colleges,” Vijay notes, highlighting the expertise inversion.

The $50,000 Insight

After two years of observation and process mapping, Vijay approached his wife with an analysis: the practice was leaving $50,000 on the table through unoptimized fees.

Her response: “I need this tomorrow.”

That moment crystallized everything. Dentists aren’t bad business people—they’re simply drowning in operational complexity while trying to maintain clinical excellence. They don’t need lectures about business strategy. They need systems that work.

“That’s kind of the genesis of this company,” Vijay recalls. Not a grand vision or market research. Just one dentist desperately needing help optimizing her practice.

The Market Nobody Wanted

Once Vijay started looking beyond his wife’s practice, he saw the pattern everywhere. Dentists, veterinarians, optometrists, chiropractors, orthodontists, oral surgeons—an entire ecosystem of retail healthcare providers operating with technology from another era.

“Anything that we call as we refer to as retail healthcare, which is almost approaching a trillion dollars in market services a year in the United States. But it’s completely ignored. It’s 50 years behind the hospital based healthcare technology.”

The market size was undeniable. The technology gap was obvious. But Silicon Valley investors weren’t interested. “In the early days, I would get chased out of the room by the investors because were so focused on dental. And they would say, oh, dental is not a big enough market.”

The rejection revealed a fundamental misunderstanding. Investors saw dental as too small and specialized. Vijay saw dental as one vertical within a massive, interconnected retail healthcare market that operated on identical principles.

The Ten-Year Build

Most founders would have pivoted after getting repeatedly rejected by investors. Vijay did something different: he ignored them and kept building.

The fragmentation was the key challenge and the key opportunity. “There are over 400 practice management systems and financial systems that the dental industry uses, same as with veterinary, same as with optometry,” Vijay notes. Each practice operated in its own technology silo, making comprehensive solutions nearly impossible.

Sikka’s approach was to build the infrastructure layer—an API platform that could connect with all these disparate systems. “Build once, deploy everywhere,” as Vijay describes it. But building those connections required painstaking work, system by system, integration by integration.

“It took us 10 years plus to build all the connections to 450 practice management systems.”

During those ten years, Sikka grew organically. “We kept growing organically by servicing our customers. We kept growing our install base,” Vijay explains. No venture capital pressure. No growth-at-all-costs mentality. Just patient, systematic infrastructure building funded by revenue from satisfied customers.

The Moment of Recognition

Around 2016, something shifted. Sikka had reached critical mass in their infrastructure build. Connections to 450 systems meant access to 96% of the retail healthcare market through a single integration. The platform that investors once dismissed as “too focused on dental” now connected dentists, veterinarians, optometrists, and more through unified infrastructure.

“Once we did that, now we had a platform which would connect with 96% of the market in the United States and Canada. And we brought our first investment around 2017, 2016, 2017 timeframe.”

The timing was intentional. Sikka approached investors from a position of strength—with the technical moat already built, the business model proven, and distribution embedded in the product itself. “We started to see rapid growth. We expanded our platform. We won four best health API awards, the latest one being just this year a couple months ago.”

The company’s install base grew to approach 45,000 practices, adding 20 to 25 new practices daily. But what really caught investor attention was the economics: 90%+ recurring revenue, approaching 110% net dollar retention, and a path to EBITDA positivity that few SaaS companies achieve.

The Innovation Culture

Success didn’t breed complacency. Sikka maintained what Vijay calls an innovation culture, staying relevant despite being over 15 years old. The team demographics tell part of the story: “Our average age of team members is actually 15 to 20 years below the average age of where, you know, where Silicon Valley technology companies are. And our women to men ratio, if you will, is also 20 points better than where the Silicon Valley is.”

Building diverse teams wasn’t just values-driven—it was strategic. “We have built a diverse team. We have built a, you know, highly, you know, we focused on culture,” Vijay explains. “That’s really what, in my opinion, has been the reason for our success.”

At 45 employees serving 150 million patients and processing a billion transactions daily, every team member carries significant weight. “The company is not a giant in the sense that you lose your sense of identity, you still understand how to run how the business works,” Vijay notes, explaining the appeal to entrepreneurial talent.

The AI Transformation

With infrastructure and distribution solved, Sikka turned toward its next evolution: becoming an AI-driven insights platform. Vijay’s background—publishing AI papers 30 years ago—positioned the company to move quickly when generative AI emerged.

“Brett, we are AI company. I mean, Sika AI,” Vijay states plainly when asked about 2025 priorities. But Sikka’s AI strategy differs fundamentally from competitors rushing to integrate ChatGPT.

The company built Dental LLM, the first large language model specifically for the dental industry. “It actually beat on benchmarks. It beat ChatGPT4.0 and Claude by anthropic and Gemini 1.5 by Google,” Vijay explains. The advantage comes from domain specificity and data sovereignty—the model runs on practitioner infrastructure, keeping patient data local.

But generative AI is just one application. Sikka is using AI for life insurance underwriting, proving that oral health impacts mortality. “We have been able to prove, working with some of the largest reinsurers and others, that oral health, if you take care of your oral health, you actually improve your mortality,” Vijay shares. Six or seven life insurance companies now use the platform for underwriting.

The company also partners with manufacturers on research and product development, “using benchmarking and clinical data” to accelerate innovation.

The Future: System of Record for an Industry

Where does Sikka go from here? The vision extends far beyond practice management software.

With 150 million patients on the platform, connections to 96% of the market, and AI capabilities that span underwriting to product development, Sikka is positioned to become something larger: the system of record for retail healthcare.

The path forward focuses on two areas. “The focus is AI. The focus is sales and marketing. That’s really the two areas that we are driving forward,” Vijay explains. AI deepens the platform’s value, making it increasingly difficult for practices to leave. Sales and marketing expand the footprint across the massive retail healthcare market.

The business metrics suggest Sikka is just beginning to capture its opportunity. Growing 40-45% annually while EBITDA positive with 110% net dollar retention creates a compounding growth engine. “We have our first year of profitability this year, which is something which makes, you know, it’s a strangely empowering thing,” Vijay shares.

For a company that spent a decade building infrastructure before raising serious capital, profitability while growing fast validates the entire unconventional strategy.

The Ignored Market’s Champion

Sikka’s story offers hope to founders tackling markets that Silicon Valley overlooks. Retail healthcare—a trillion-dollar industry—operated with 50-year-old technology because it seemed too fragmented, too specialized, too difficult.

Vijay saw opportunity in that difficulty. The fragmentation that scared off competitors became Sikka’s moat. The decade-long infrastructure build that seemed too patient for venture capital created advantages that are now nearly impossible to replicate.

From an office manager role in his wife’s practice to a platform serving 150 million patients, Vijay built Sikka by staying focused on solving real problems for practitioners who everyone else ignored. The result isn’t just a successful company—it’s infrastructure that’s reshaping how an entire industry operates.