Adhira Tippur of Kairos Health on Building AI Voice Agents for Dental Practices
Adhira Tippur grew up in the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas, where her mom runs four dental practices, and spent much of her childhood after school answering phones and checking patients in at the front desk. She noticed that the team was always busy, yet follow-up calls to overdue patients and people with unscheduled treatment never seemed to get made. Those missed calls added up, and patients sometimes put off care they genuinely needed.
That is what led Adhira and her three co-founders to build Kairos Health, which uses AI voice agents to call patients on behalf of dental practices, answer their questions and book appointments directly into the practice's scheduling software. The team spent last summer going door to door through hundreds of dental offices, and what they learned from dentists and office managers shaped the product. Kairos is now part of Y Combinator's Fall 2026 batch.
Adhira's focus now is getting Kairos into more practices across the country, especially multi-location groups. To women building startups, she says not to wait until you feel like the most qualified person in the room, and to get comfortable asking for things. In this Q&A with Founded by Women, she shares why she started Kairos Health, what hundreds of dental office visits taught her, and what is next after Y Combinator.
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Q: What made you start Kairos Health, and what did you see at your mom's practices that you wanted to fix?
I grew up in the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas, where my mom runs four dental practices. A lot of my childhood was spent hanging around her offices after school, helping answer phones, checking patients in, translating for Spanish-speaking families, and occasionally being assigned whatever task nobody else wanted to do.
One thing I noticed was that the front desk was always busy, but there was a whole category of work that never seemed to get done. A patient would come in, be told they needed a crown or an implant, and leave without scheduling. Another patient would be six months overdue for a cleaning. Someone else would cancel an appointment and never reschedule. The staff knew these patients needed follow-up, but between answering ringing phones, checking insurance, and managing the patients physically standing in front of them, when exactly were they supposed to make those calls?
Over time, those missed follow-ups added up. Patients would go months without hearing from the office, sometimes putting off treatment they genuinely needed. Growing up in the Rio Grande Valley, where access to healthcare can already be difficult, I saw how much something as simple as a follow-up phone call could matter.
That's what led my three co-founders and me to build Kairos Health. We developed AI voice agents that call patients on behalf of dental practices, whether they're overdue for a cleaning, have unscheduled treatment, or need to reschedule a canceled appointment. The agents can have conversations with patients, answer questions, and book appointments directly into the practice's scheduling software. We also have an inbound AI receptionist that answers calls around the clock, handles scheduling and insurance verification, and supports patients in multiple languages.
The part I find most exciting is that we're helping practices reconnect with people who might otherwise go another six months without scheduling an appointment. And for the office managers who have been staring at a list of 500 overdue patients for weeks, it's a pretty big relief, too.
Q: What did you learn from visiting hundreds of dental offices this summer?
First, that college students walking into a dental office unannounced is not exactly everyone's idea of a great Tuesday morning.
My co-founders and I spent much of the summer going door to door, introducing ourselves to dentists and office managers, asking questions, and showing them what we were building. We got everything from enthusiastic demos to polite rejections to the occasional receptionist who could tell we were about to give a sales pitch before we'd even opened our mouths.
One of the biggest lessons was that a dental practice can be incredibly busy and still be leaving a surprising amount of revenue on the table. We'd hear about offices with hundreds of patients overdue for hygiene appointments, treatment plans worth thousands of dollars that had never been scheduled, and cancellations that left valuable chair time empty. In many offices, the follow-up list kept growing because there was always something more urgent happening at the front desk.
We started paying much closer attention to how practices handled patient reactivation. Who was responsible for calling patients with unscheduled treatment? How often did those calls actually happen? What happened when someone canceled an appointment? The answers varied from office to office, but we kept hearing some version of "we try to get to it when we have time."
We also learned pretty quickly that dentists don't particularly care how impressive your AI sounds in a demo. You can talk about voice models, automation, and integrations all day, but what they really want to know is, "Will this put more patients in my chairs? Will it save my staff time? And will it actually work with the software we already use?"
Those questions pushed us to build around the everyday realities of running a practice, including how appointments get scheduled, how different types of treatment are handled, and when a patient needs to speak with an actual staff member.
Probably my favorite lesson, though, was how much we learned from office managers. They're the people who know exactly where things break, which patients need an extra phone call, and why a scheduling rule that sounds simple on paper is actually complicated. Some of our most useful product feedback came from conversations that started with, "Okay, but here's what actually happens at our office..."
By the end of the summer, we'd spent a lot of time in dental offices, heard a lot of variations of "come back when the doctor isn't busy," and filled our notebooks with things we never would have thought to ask sitting behind a laptop.
Q: What's next for Kairos after Y Combinator, and what would you tell women building startups?
We're currently part of Y Combinator's Fall 2026 batch, and our focus is on getting Kairos into more dental practices across the country, especially multi-location groups where one missed follow-up process can affect hundreds or thousands of patients.
I'm particularly excited about what we're building on the outbound side. Dental practices have years of patient relationships and treatment recommendations sitting in their existing software. Someone who was recommended a crown six months ago, someone who's overdue for a cleaning, or someone who canceled an appointment and never rebooked. We want to make it easy for practices to follow up consistently, get those patients back on the schedule, and make better use of the chair time they already have. We're also continuing to expand our inbound capabilities so practices can handle calls, scheduling, and patient questions even when their staff is busy or the office is closed.
As for advice, I'd say don't wait until you feel like the most qualified person in the room to start building something.
When we first started Kairos, we were four students walking into dental offices trying to convince people who had been practicing dentistry longer than we'd been alive to trust us with part of their operations. I remember how intimidating those early conversations could be. We'd walk in with a demo, get asked a question we hadn't anticipated, and sometimes leave with a completely different understanding of what we needed to build.
Growing up around my mom's practices gave me a starting point, but there's still an enormous amount I've had to learn about running a company, selling to customers, and building a product that people depend on every day. A lot of that learning has happened through uncomfortable conversations, failed pitches, and being willing to ask questions that probably sounded obvious to everyone else.
I've also learned that you can't be too precious about your ideas. We've had to rethink parts of our product, change how we sell it, and hear "no" more times than I can count. Sometimes the most useful feedback comes from the person who has absolutely no intention of buying from you.
And I'd encourage more women to get comfortable asking for things. Ask for the meeting, the introduction, the pilot, the sale. I used to spend so much time thinking about whether I was bothering someone by reaching out. Now I figure the worst that can happen is they say no, and I've already survived plenty of those.
One of the most rewarding parts of building Kairos has been going from helping out at my mom's front desk after school to building something that can help practices like hers across the country. I still call her for advice about how dental offices actually operate, so in some ways, not much has changed.
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