Can AI fix your toothache? Meet the founder on a mission to figure it out
Ambition A.M. takes a look at how dentistry has gone digital by speaking with Dr. Deepak Singh Aulak, founder of UK’s first health regulated dental app, Toothfairy.
Have you ever been excited to go to the dentist?
The answer is probably no, because it usually costs a lot of money, takes up too much time and getting an appointment is far from easy.
Dr. Deepak Singh Aulak, however, is the 30-year-old dentist-turned-tech entrepreneur who is somehow making me personally question that long list of excuses.
Aulak founded his digital dentistry app Toothfairy in 2019 as a way to prove that at-home dental care is possible, with a special focus on early detection and prevention.
It works by giving patients easy access to a healthcare professional within minutes – almost like having a dentist in your pocket – 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
“It’s like a Fitbit for your teeth,” Aulak says, with a laugh.
Toothfairy took off after the pandemic left 19m people unable to get dental appointments.
The app, which has seen 200 per cent year-on-year growth over the past two years, is now on track to reaching profitability this year, with revenue also set to double.
How does it work?
Toothfairy has treated over 3m people and has struck deals with nearly 20,000 companies to provide dental treatment and virtual consultation care to their employees.
It’s as simple as uploading a photo or video of your mouth or virtually chatting with a dentist, with the service in turn offering personalised help, video consultations, virtual exams and even prescriptions for pain management.
But why would you want to take a picture of your mouth and use a digital dentist in the first place?
Turns out, there were over 23m sick days lost in the UK last year due to dental pain, as patients still struggle to find the time, availability, or cash needed to make it to a clinic.
And if you find yourself building a career in the dental industry for nearly a decade, like Aulak, you might just come to find yourself frustrated with such a lack of affordable, accessible, and available care.
It’s not the sexiest or the most interesting field to reinvent, but it’s something that’s really, really broken.
Dr. Deepak Singh Aulak
However, with the app now seeing over 1,000 patient reviews and a total of 8 in 10 of its users saying they feel more confident in managing their dental health, the entrepreneur couldn’t seem more sure as to where Toothfairy’s future is headed.
Challenges
As with any new venture and a mission to disrupt, however, challenges are expected.
Especially if you’re trying to prove to an “old boys club”, Aulak says, that something so out of the ordinary can be possible.
“Dentistry is a very old boys club, you know, typically if you’re a dentist, your dad was a dentist, your granddad was a dentist, you inherit a practice… and there were a lot of challenges around building a digital business,” he says.
“We had a lot of the old boys club saying this can’t be done, why is this done, you know, dentistry should be fixed in another way… and then Covid occurred and we proved to people that dentistry can be done remotely.”
What’s next?
Innovation is never over when it comes to building a tech start-up, because if you’re going to stay ahead of the curve, you must adapt to the ever-changing market accordingly.
The next step for the 30-person team at Toothfairy, however, seems to be learning how to – carefully – master the implementation of AI within their everyday operations.
“Now we’re building an AI model, so we’ve just tested it against 50 dentists [and] over 100 patient cases, and the AI is just as good as a dentist at detecting plaque, so bacteria, gum disease and early signs of cavities… [then] they’ll connect you to a real dentist,” Aulak says.
AI might be Toothfairy’s way of “using technology to marry up and reinvent the system”, but figuring out how to properly train AI with the right data sets can be tricky. Especially when no two mouths – or people – are the same, and technology can’t do everything.
“Are those data sets equal across the whole population? Because if they’re not, the AI will only serve a segment of the population and I think that’s what worries me most,” Aulak adds.
CV
Name: Deepak Aulak
Company: Toothfairy
Founded: 2019
Staff: 30+
Title: CEO
Age: 30
Born: 1994
Lives: London, born Wolverhampton
Studied: King’s College London
Talents: Making people smile
Motto: Out of darkness cometh light – Wolverhampton City motto
Most known for: Either treating your favourite celebrity or smiling on TV
Favourite book: Black Box Thinking
Best piece of advice: Make mistakes quick