Jul 16, 2026 · 19m · top-founders
Practice by Numbers: $16.5M Dental SaaS, 24% EBITDA, Zero VC - Rohit Garg
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this interview with Nathan Latka, Practice by Numbers co-founder Rohit Garg discusses building a highly profitable, bootstrapped dental software platform projecting $16.5 million in ARR with over 30% EBITDA margins while charting an AI-driven future.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Nathan holds 36.3% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Nathan as informed peer 5.2 Guest teaching 4.0 Guest disagreement 2.4 Nathan pushing back 3.8
speaking balance: gold is Nathan, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 11:14 Rohit rejects premise of growing faster with VC fuel
Rohit directly challenges Nathan's suggestion that 30-40% growth is slow, arguing that buying revenue introduces unnecessary risk for a highly profitable bootstrapped company.
Hardest push from Nathan ▶ 11:02 Nathan pushes Rohit on small growth rateNathan directly challenges Rohit by stating that growing from 12.5M to 16.5M feels like small growth given their market position and product strength.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 6:21 Rohit educates Nathan on dental PMS market concentrationWhen Nathan tries to use the number of website integrations to gauge breadth, Rohit explains that five integrations cover the vast majority of the dental market.
Nathan holds their own ▶ 10:06 Nathan calculates exact ARR from customer count and ACVNathan instantly combines Rohit's ACV and top-level customer numbers to accurately estimate their 16.5M ARR run rate before Rohit states it.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Nathan as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Nathan pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Origins of Practice by Numbers and Dr. Aditi's Practice | 5 | 6 | 3 | 4 | Nathan probes how the software works and why competitors like Dentrix don't copy them, even checking their integrations page to challenge their coverage. Rohit explains dental practice software dynamics and why five core integrations represent the bulk of the market. | |
| Annual Contract Values and Enterprise Dental Pricing | 6 | 4 | 2 | 4 | Nathan does rapid-fire math on customer numbers, locations, and ACVs, initially miscalculating the top contract before Rohit clarifies that the ACV is per location and tiered by modules. | |
| The Bootstrapped Advantage, High EBITDA, and Organic Growth | 5 | 5 | 4 | 5 | Nathan pushes on why the business isn't growing faster from $12.5M to $16.5M. Rohit pushes back strongly, highlighting their zero VC backing, high EBITDA, and refusal to buy unsustainable revenue in a slow-moving market. | |
| Agentic AI Workflows and Global Team Structure | 4 | 3 | 2 | 3 | The conversation moves into agentic AI, voice agents, and headcounts. Nathan asks if low-code dental workers will build their own SaaS, but Rohit dismisses that threat as fringe. | |
| Historical Growth Timeline from 2015 to Current Scale | 6 | 2 | 1 | 3 | Nathan charts the historical trajectory from 2015 to current metrics, before posing a hypothetical buyout offer from Henry Schein to gauge exit criteria. |
Statements from this episode (17)
Garg: Dentists lack the training and data to make business decisions
“There's a lot of little, little, little things that a business owner, like a dentist who's never really trained to be a business owner, they have to make all these decisions that they can't, and they don't have the right data, they don't have the right skills …”
Garg: Henry Schein and Patterson lack software engineering capabilities
“These are owned by Henry Schein and Patterson. These are large supply companies. They don't have their technical skills or even the people to be able to build software the way we can.”
Garg: Fragmented dental practice management market is dominated by five vendors
“So dentistry, even though it's quite fragmented, it is dominated by the five that we have listed.”
Garg: Practice by Numbers averages $12k-$13k annually per location
“So at this point, we are reaching about 12, 13,000 dollars and that's the average.”
Garg: Practice by Numbers' largest customer pays around $250k annually
“Our largest customer is about 250,000, because they don't have all the features, right?”
Practice by Numbers Has 1,300 to 1,400 Top-Level Customers
“So the top level customers, we have about 13, 14, 13 to 1400 top level customers.”
Garg: Practice by Numbers Will Reach $16.5M ARR by Year End
“We kind of were at two million dollars at 2021, at the end of 2021, and now we're gonna end this year at about 16 and a half million dollars.”
Practice by Numbers Has Taken Zero Outside Capital
“And there's not a single dollar that's been taken.”
Garg: Practice by Numbers Eyes 30%+ EBITDA and 35-40% Growth in 2026
“That's actually, this year will be even the better profitable year. We're looking at, I don't know, 30% perhaps of 30% plus EBITDA, right? And 35, 40% growth.”
Practice by Numbers Relies Almost Entirely on Word-of-Mouth Inbound Sales
“And also, all of our sales are inbound, right? Meaning it's all word of mouth. We go to some shows, shows produce a little bit for us, but almost everything is people telling other people.”
Practice by Numbers Generated ~22-24% EBITDA and $1.5M FCF in 2025
“2025, we were at about EBITDA was about 24, 22, 23 or 24. We haven't really fully closed the books yet, but there was a free cash flow of about 1.5 last year.”
Practice by Numbers employs roughly 80 people globally, including 17-18 engineers
“So we have about 80 people worldwide, and about 42, 43 of them are in the U.S., and the rest of them are in India, and engineering-wise, we have about 18, 17, 18 developers, and at least three or four of them are thinking about agent workflows.”
Garg: Nimble SaaS incumbents will survive any DIY AI software apocalypse
“Many people have tried. Many people will try as they call it the SaaS apocalypse. It's gonna happen, happen in micro places, but most dentists just want to come in, do the work, see their patients, go back home. Will there be more noise? Yeah, there'll be more…”
Garg: Practice by Numbers hit $1M revenue in 2018 within 14 months
“I think we broke the first million in twenty-eighteen. So in about 14 months, I think we were at a million.”