Spotlight: Sezer Kemer @ Azops Dental

A spotlight is a short-form interview with a leader in health tech. In this spotlight, you'll hear from Sezer Kemer, co-founder and CEO of Azops Dental.

What does Azops Dental do?

Azops Dental automates dental insurance verification for dental practices. It saves a typical practice more than 90 hours a month. Before a patient comes in, our AI agent Natalie confirms their coverage. She uses Stedi to bring in instant eligibility feedback, browses through the clinic's insurance portal, calls the insurance companies when she has to, and pulls the full picture: eligibility, plan maximums, deductibles, frequencies, and history. Clinics can fully customize their verification form with up to 80 questions for a full coverage breakdown.

Three things make us different from most verification tools that practices use. First, a trained specialist reviews every verification. Second, if the AI can't finish one on its own, a trained specialist finishes it by hand. Together, those two mean the office ends up with a complete and accurate breakdown, and nobody on the front desk spends their morning on hold. Third, we are some of the only ones who can write all of that information back into the practice's benefit table in a way that's safe, legal, and compliant.

Most practice management software does not give you endpoints to write benefit details into its benefit table. The workarounds people use, like writing through a SQL connection, are dangerous and put you at risk of violating the platform's terms of use, or even losing technical support. Because we keep a person in the loop, we can write all of it back safely through remote control, whether that's Open Dental, Dentrix, Eaglesoft, Dentrix Ascend, CareStack, Curve, WinOMS, or many other systems.

How did you end up working in health tech?

Kind of by accident. I'm French. I dropped out of school to start building companies, and I came to the U.S. on an O-1 visa to keep doing it.

My co-founder and I started out building AI voice agents for accounts-receivable work, basically the calls that finance and healthcare teams get buried under. We called it OS Recovery.

Health tech wasn't the plan. It's just where we found the hardest and most useful version of the problem. Over time, dental practices kept bringing up the same thing: insurance verification.

So we pointed the whole company at that one problem, and Azops Dental came out of it. We're now venture-backed at a $5M valuation.

How does your role intersect with revenue cycle management (RCM)?

Insurance verification sits at the very front of the revenue cycle. Everything after it depends on getting it right. If you don't know a patient's coverage before you treat them, you hand out wrong estimates, claims get denied, and your AR keeps aging. In dental, that front step is usually the weakest one.

Paradoxically, we started out at the end of the pipeline, trying to solve collections. Staying open-minded is what let us see that the real problem is at the beginning. Fix the front, and everything after it gets easier.

What do you think RCM will look like two years from now?

In two years, a dentist can come out of school, open a practice, and know almost nothing about billing. They take appointments and treat patients, and that's it. While they work, the procedure gets recorded and documented with almost no input from them. Benefits are transparent. Claims file themselves and get handled automatically so the practice gets paid faster. When a claim is denied, an AI agent fights it, probably against another AI agent on the payer's side. Payment reminders go out by phone and email on their own. Financial reporting runs on AI that can tell you, pretty accurately, what you'll make by the end of the year.

The dentist just does dentistry, and everything else runs in the background.