Annie (Lehi, UT) raises $4 million to expand its AI “coworker” for dental practices. Founder Conner Ludlow focuses on practical automation, customer growth, and strategic hiring amid a competitive dental AI market.
Lehi, Utah — November 20, 2025
Annie, a Lehi-Utah-based startup building an AI coworker for dental practices, has raised a $4 million seed round co-led by Las Olas Venture Capital (Fort Lauderdale) and Chicago Ventures (Chicago), with participation from Gamba Ventures and other investors. The raise marks Las Olas’ first Utah investment and the second for Chicago Ventures, both of which have recently begun looking more seriously at companies in the state’s fast-growing tech ecosystem.
“We’re excited to back Annie,” said Nate Vasel, partner at Las Olas Venture Capital. “The company is building the intelligence layer for front-office and revenue operations in dentistry—helping practices capture more patients, book faster, and recover revenue that would otherwise slip through the cracks. In an industry where 30–35% of patient calls go unanswered and an estimated $75 billion is lost each year, Annie’s AI-powered platform is reshaping how independent practices and DSOs operate. Higher conversion, lower churn, and faster scale are already showing up in the numbers: across hundreds of practices, Annie has generated $5 million in customer revenue and saved more than 30,000 staff hours. It’s a clear demonstration of what an always-on AI teammate can actually deliver. We’re proud to support Conner Ludlow, Preston Stark, Jimmy Arroyo, and the entire Annie team as they modernize one of the most overlooked yet essential functions in healthcare."
Vasel, who will join Annie's Board of Directors, added, “Co-led by us and Chicago Ventures, with participation from Gamba Ventures, this $4 million seed round will help Annie advance product development, strengthen its AI teammate capabilities, and deepen integrations with major practice management systems.
Founder and CEO Conner Ludlow is rooted inside the dental industry—first as a software engineer, then as a co-founder of a 100-employee dental call center, and eventually as COO. That firsthand exposure led him to a blunt assessment: most dental teams are exhausted, understaffed, and drowning in administrative work. “They don’t need another dashboard—they need fewer spinning plates,” Ludlow shared with TechBuzz.
Product Spotlight: How Annie Actually Works
The company is building what it calls an “always-on AI coworker” — an operational teammate designed to shoulder the routine, high-volume tasks that normally bury front-office staff.
At its core, Annie handles patient communication across phone, web, and messaging. She answers calls 24/7, responds naturally to questions, and books appointments directly into a practice’s management system. Each instance of Annie is trained on a practice’s real scheduling rules, accepted insurances, appointment types, provider availability, and specific office policies. That means she can follow the same logic a human team member would use when slotting a patient into the calendar.
Beyond inbound communication, Annie manages proactive outreach. She runs automated recare campaigns to bring back overdue patients — a task that most offices acknowledge is vital but rarely have time to execute consistently. She also handles lead intake from website chats and form submissions, keeping practices responsive even outside business hours.
What sets Annie apart is how Ludlow frames the product: not as AI-for-AI’s-sake, but as a practical worker designed to reduce missed calls, lighten administrative load, and eliminate the operational leaks that cost practices real money. Each practice can control Annie’s boundaries — which questions she answers, which appointments she’s allowed to schedule, and what should be handed off to a human.
For dental teams stretched by staffing shortages and rising workloads, Annie’s pitch is simple: let software carry the repetitive work so people can focus on patients, not paperwork.
Across hundreds of practices, Annie has already generated $5 million in revenue for customers and saved 30,000 employee hours, the equivalent of 3.5 years of labor.
A Founder Who Knows the Space
Ludlow studied information systems at BYU, expecting to become a developer. Instead, he co-founded a dental call center with two friends during school. He served as the technical co-founder and built the company’s internal systems before stepping into the COO role. Running operations gave him a deeper, unfiltered view into how dental offices actually function—not the polished software version, but the real day-to-day strain of patients, insurance, scheduling, and phone volume.
By 2022 he felt the pull back toward engineering. He stepped away from his operator role, spent a year writing code, experimenting with various indie hacker projects, and diving deep into the emerging wave of LLMs. One project—a fantasy football AI analyst—built enough traction to sharpen his understanding of agents, chat systems, and real-time AI workflows. It wasn’t a company, but it laid the technical foundation for what became Annie.
“I wasn’t trying to start a dental AI company,” Ludlow says. “I just kept building, and next thing I knew we had paying customers, then angels wanting in. It grew naturally.”
Ludlow remains a solo founder, not by deliberate design but because Annie gained momentum quickly, and he simply kept executing.
A Practical Approach in a Hype-Heavy Market
Dental AI has become a crowded field almost overnight. Many newcomers are chasing the same pitch: AI can answer a phone call, dentists can afford software, and the category is ripe for automation. But Ludlow is wary of the FOMO-driven sales tactics popping up around him.
“It’s easy right now to sell hype,” he says. “People oversell what AI can do today. We’d rather be painfully practical. AI is a tool—not a silver bullet—and our product reflects that.”
That pragmatism is exactly what investors latched onto. Chicago Ventures describes itself as a Midwest-minded fund backing gritty, execution-first founders. Las Olas takes a similar stance as a founder-led venture fund. The two had previously co-led deals, and when they each showed interest in Annie, they jointly approached Ludlow with a structure that allowed the entire round to close between them quickly.
Raising to Move in a Land Grab
Annie closed the round with just five employees. The company plans to be at 12 employees by the end of the year, with most new hires in engineering, support, and sales. Ludlow says this raise is about one thing: participating aggressively in a land grab.
“We’re in a competitive space. There’s no sense pretending otherwise,” he says. “This raise lets us go fight.”
Much of that fight involves getting in front of dentists in person. Annie has been seeing strong ROI from trade shows—one of the few reliable channels in dental—and plans to substantially increase its presence. The company’s next stops include the Greater New York Dental Meeting, followed by major shows in Boston and Chicago in early 2026.
“Even when a show isn’t incredible, you have to go,” Ludlow says. “Visibility matters in a land grab. You don’t know who you’re going to meet, and being physically present builds trust.”
What's Next
While Ludlow says the team’s culture remains intentionally scrappy, he plans to hire across sales, engineering, customer success, and operations in the coming weeks and months.
“We’ve got a lot of experienced people who chose to come early and build,” he says. “They’ve been in leadership roles before, and now we’re giving them teams to grow.”
With the raise closed, growth accelerating, and competition heating up, Annie’s push into the next phase looks like it will be fast and much more visible.
Learn more at helloannie.com or watch introductory video below: