What we talked about
Shiva Kumar is the Co-Founder & CTO of Dentulu, a health-tech platform unifying the fragmented world of dentistry into a single ecosystem for providers, offices, patients, and suppliers. In this conversation, Shiva shares how Dentulu evolved from mobile dentistry to a comprehensive telehealth platform accelerated by COVID, and why meticulous, millimeter-level clinical workflows demand a very different approach than “move fast and break things.”
Show notes
Shiva Kumar has spent more than two decades building software, but the discipline that telehealth demands is unlike anything he encountered in conventional SaaS. At Dentulu, he is unifying a famously fragmented industry: dentistry runs on a patchwork of imaging systems, practice management tools, insurance backends, and supplier relationships, and stitching them into one workflow is as much regulatory and clinical work as it is engineering. Shiva’s two-decade career across India, the UAE, and the U.S. taught him to lead distributed teams long before remote work was fashionable, and that experience now underpins how Dentulu scales a platform where a millimeter of error has clinical consequences.
What we covered
- The shift from mobile dentistry to a telehealth platform: COVID accelerated the move from “we go to you” to “we connect providers and patients remotely,” and Dentulu had to rebuild its product around clinician-grade reliability rather than convenience.
- Why dental tech cannot adopt a “move fast and break things” posture: the workflows are millimeter-precise, the regulatory environment is unforgiving, and a bad release puts patients at risk in ways consumer software never does.
- Partnership with Viome and the broader thesis that dental health is a window into systemic health, Shiva sees the long-term opportunity as connecting oral microbiome data to whole-body diagnostics rather than treating dentistry as a standalone vertical.
- Leading global engineering teams: the lessons from running CA Infotech for over a decade transferred directly into building Dentulu’s distributed team across geographies, with culture and clarity of ownership as the load-bearing investments.
- AI for development: Shiva’s UN talk framed AI as an access multiplier in healthcare, not a replacement for clinicians. Dentulu uses AI to triage and to surface what providers should look at, not to make the call itself.
- Advice to founders entering regulated health tech: do not underestimate the years it takes to earn provider trust, and do not let the velocity of consumer software trick you into shipping clinical features before they are ready.