$16.5M ARR, $0 Raised: Why Practice by Numbers Won’t Grow Faster

Nathan Latka did the arithmetic out loud in the middle of the interview — roughly 1,300 customers at an average contract of $13,000 a year puts the company near $15 or $16 million — and Rohit Garg confirmed it: “We will end the year at about 16 and a half.” It was April 2026, and 2025 had closed at $12.5 million. So Latka pushed, the way he does: good niche, good product, husband-and-wife founding team. Why is $12.5 million to $16.5 million the best you can do?

Garg didn’t reach for the market or the product. “It is small growth,” he said. “First of all, remember we are bootstrapped completely.” A beat later he added that not a single dollar has ever been taken. The record on Practice by Numbers’ GetLatka profile agrees: no rounds on file, total funding zero, against a revenue line that has risen every year since the company restarted.

$0raised since 2015, against the $16.5M of ARR Garg expects to close 2026 on

That one fact reorganizes everything else in the conversation. Nothing about the growth rate here is a market ceiling or a product gap — it is a spending decision made by founders who own all of it, and it has a visible price tag. The clearest one sits in payments: about $190 million of card volume runs through the platform today, against roughly $2 billion the company can already see moving inside its own customers’ books.

Weekend SQL queries for his wife’s practice

Garg’s route into dentistry was domestic. “I got involved in dentistry through marriage,” he said. “My wife is a dentist. She’s a co-founder. And she opened a practice in 2010.” He was working at Philips Healthcare with a medical imaging background, and the product spec arrived as dinner-table complaints.

The complaints were all the same shape. Was the marketing working. Was the money going to the right place. Was the hygienist doing the right thing. “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 to make those decisions,” Garg said. His answer, for years, was to open the practice database on a weekend: “I would run spreadsheets and I would run, you know, SQL queries for her in the database, in the backend and try to figure out, give her answers.”

By 2015 he had decided the weekend job was a market. He and a third co-founder, the CTO, wrote the first version themselves — “by sweat equity because we were bored at our current jobs, we wrote it all ourselves.” Analytics came first, because analytics was the part he had been hand-rolling for his wife. Then the market took its own detour.

• 2010 · The practice Dr. Aditi opens her dental office; her husband starts answering her data questions on weekends.
• Mid-to-late 2015 · First line of code Garg and the CTO co-founder build the analytics product by sweat equity, still employed elsewhere.
• 2018 · First $1M “I think we broke the first million in 2018.” GetLatka records $1M in June 2018.
• 2020 · COVID “We were growing, growing and COVID kind of cut us at our knees.”
• 2021 · Relaunch at $2M The company restarts and ends the year at about $2 million.

The relaunch is the hinge in the numbers. From $2 million at the end of 2021, Practice by Numbers roughly doubled twice and then kept compounding.

What a dental office actually pays

What Garg sells now is not the analytics tool. It is what he calls a practice in a box, and it is defined by what a dental office would otherwise buy from half a dozen vendors.

Underneath everything sits the practice management system — Dentrix or Open Dental, the dental equivalents of Epic in medicine. Practice by Numbers does not compete with those. “The competitors are listed, but those are the systems we partner with. These are the systems we sit on top of,” Garg said. Everything above the PMS is fair game.

• Analytics — the original product, pulling from the PMS, QuickBooks, the phones and Google Analytics for what Garg calls “this 360-degree view of the practice.”
• Online booking and intake forms — the layer most offices bought separately over the past decade.
• Voice — replacing a VoIP vendor; every call gets recorded and transcribed, with intent and sentiment scored.
• Payments — the POS terminal, launched in 2025 and the newest line in the business.
• Websites — the last piece of white space sitting around the practice management system.

The obvious question is why the PMS vendors don’t simply build all of it themselves. Garg’s answer is about who owns them: Dentrix and its peers belong to Henry Schein and Patterson, which are dental supply distributors. “They don’t have the technical skills or even the people to build software the way we can,” he said. It is the standard vertical SaaS wager — a specialist outrunning the incumbent that owns the system of record. He claims the payoff shows in his customers, who he says run at almost twice the national average in production volume because they come to him for depth.

The market is fragmented but the integration surface is not. The company lists only five integrations, and Garg says that is deliberate: “Dentistry, even though it’s quite fragmented, it is dominated by the five that we have listed.” Focusing on those five, he says, is how the company gets to 70,000 or 80,000 dental offices covered.

Pricing climbs with what an office switches on. The core package is operational; layering voice, AI and payments on top takes a location to the ceiling. The average is $12,000 to $13,000 per location per year — the figure GetLatka carries as the company’s average contract value — and a fully loaded location reaches $18,000 or $19,000.

That ladder resolves an oddity Latka caught immediately: the gap between the average customer and the largest one looks far too small. It looks small because the ceiling is per location, not per logo. Some customers run one location, some run 40. The largest account pays about $250,000 a year rather than the 40-times-$18,000 Latka calculated on the fly, and Garg volunteered the reason: “They don’t have all the features.” Across 1,300 to 1,400 top-level customers, that adds up to about 2,000 locations and 5,000 to 6,000 individual providers.

$190 million processed, $2 billion visible

Payments launched in 2025, and it is the part of the business where the bootstrap constraint is easiest to measure. Garg put first-year volume at about $190 million. He also knows, unusually precisely, how much more there is, because the analytics product already reads every practice’s collections: roughly $2 billion of volume sitting inside the same customer base.

Latka did that subtraction out loud — roughly $1.8 billion of visible volume the company is not processing — and asked how they win it. Garg didn’t argue with the number.

It’s an upsell motion. Just we are strapped for resources. So we’re trying to hire the right people so we can actually drive that upsell to be able to call these offices.

Rohit Garg, co-founder, Practice by Numbers

The rest of his answer is why it isn’t purely a hiring problem. Offices already run cards through Costco or Bank of America and are “really not super interested in switching unless you show them the value.” Integration buys them card-on-file, PCI compliance and payment plans, but as Garg put it, “change management in the small business is the hardest thing to do.”

Where the volume does flow, the economics are good. Terminals go in through Adyen and Stripe, and Practice by Numbers takes a spread on top — “so it’s quite profitable.” Latka pressed on whether the take rate is under 2%. Garg hesitated, confirmed it averages under 2%, and then said he would rather the number stayed off the record, because customers who know it negotiate harder.

Garg sized the same opportunity twice. Before a monitor crash forced the recording to restart, he put the volume in his system at “$3 to $4 billion”; after the reset he gave “$2-ish billion” and worked from that. This post uses the lower figure he settled on.

A rule-of-70 company that won’t buy revenue

Garg’s own frame for the business is a benchmark most software founders only aspire to. He expects 35 to 40% growth this year against 30%-plus EBITDA: “So we’re a rule of 70, 80 company.” That clears the rule of 40 test with room to spare, and it is what turns his refusal to accelerate into an argument rather than an excuse.

The 2025 books back him up. EBITDA landed somewhere between 22 and 24% — “we haven’t really fully closed the books yet” — on $12.5 million of revenue, with free cash flow of about $1.5 million, the figure GetLatka carries for the company. And all of it arrives without a sales machine: “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.”

Asked once more why he doesn’t pour fuel on that, Garg gave the most disarming answer in the interview.

So the short answer is I don’t know why we are growing at the rate which we are growing and why we shouldn’t grow faster. We probably should, but that would mean a lot more fuel to the fire and a lot more risk.

Rohit Garg, co-founder, Practice by Numbers

What follows the admission is the reasoning. Dentistry is a slow-moving market, and in a slow-moving market paid growth is just purchased revenue: “That’s what I don’t like is just buying your revenue because that gets you that short term hump.” Underneath the arithmetic is the co-founder who isn’t on the podcast. “We are in it because of Aditi and this is very important to her,” Garg said. “So it’s not just growing it as fast as possible and then getting out and she’s building this as a legacy for her.”

The $180 million question

The company runs on about 80 people, 42 or 43 of them in the United States and the rest in India. Seventeen or eighteen are developers, and three or four of those are working on agentic workflows. Garg, who says he stays technically involved himself, spends a lot of his own time on how to make the existing stack fully agentic.

His picture of where that ends is a product with no interface worth clicking.

An office manager doesn’t sit in front of their desk. They just roam around with a headset in their ear and say, hey, Nathan is here. Please check them in. Nathan is done. Send them the bill.

Rohit Garg, co-founder, Practice by Numbers

It is also his answer to Latka’s theory that the next decade belongs to atoms — that the logical move for a company sitting on every dental practice’s numbers is to start buying dental practices. Garg won’t: dental service organizations have tried it, and “many of them have actually folded and failed.” He points instead at the Sequoia framing of service as software rather than software as a service, and at pricing that follows it — selling the whole system for running a dental office, “perhaps even as a percentage of their revenue.” Ten years out he puts the company at “$100 million plus revenue. That’s absolutely possible.”

Which brings the interview to its last question. Latka posed a hypothetical with a real buyer in it: Henry Schein, the supply giant that owns Dentrix, arrives with $180 million in cash. For scale, GetLatka’s model puts an estimated valuation of $122.4 million on the business — an estimate, not a marked price, and one built on a company with no funding round to anchor it. Garg neither took the bait nor dodged it.

It’s gonna be a tough conversation because there’s gonna be differing opinions and we’re gonna have to make that call with hopefully a consensus. And the key question that we’re gonna try to answer is, have we done enough? Have we built what we wanted to build and are we done? And if we are, at that point, we take it. And if we are not, we don’t take it.

Rohit Garg, co-founder, Practice by Numbers

SourcesRohit Garg’s interview with Nathan Latka, recorded April 2026; GetLatka company records for Practice by Numbers, including revenue rows dated May 2018 through 2026 and a customer count recorded March 2026.