Healthcare IT · Clinic communications

Dodo

A San Francisco startup building AI phone and text agents that answer calls, book appointments and refill prescriptions for veterinary and specialty clinics. Y Combinator backed, no human in the loop, still very early.

Shadowing the front desk

“If you’ve been to a specialty clinic recently, chances are you’ve seen us shadowing their front desk,” the Dodo founders wrote in their Y Combinator launch post. That is how the product started: three friends sitting in veterinary waiting rooms, listening to a receptionist juggle a ringing phone, a drop-in client and a fax machine.

The company's pitch is that a clinic's front desk runs on binders. Receptionists are trained off printed manuals for triage questions, refill policies and emergency routing, and Dodo says it built its AI agents by training on those same manuals. The agents answer inbound calls and texts, update patient records inside a clinic's practice management software, schedule and reschedule visits, and place automatic outbound calls when a same-day cancellation opens a slot.

The rollout model, according to an independent write-up of the launch, starts small: a clinic first forwards its voicemails to the AI so it can learn from real, non-live calls before it answers a phone live.

The problem, in the founders' numbers

Dodo's own launch materials frame the problem in a short list of statistics, none independently audited. Clinics are “understaffed,” with administrative staff burned out by long hours. They are “undertrained”: the company says one in three medical receptionists leaves the job each year. And they are “phone-based,” with up to 80 percent of communication happening by phone and, per the same materials, callers spending 67 percent of their call time on hold.

Those figures come from Dodo's own Y Combinator launch post, not from a cited study, so they should be read as the company's framing of the problem it is selling into rather than a verified industry statistic.

Three friends, one grad school

Dominik Moehrle, Julius Hillebrand and Tim Reinhart founded Dodo in 2024. “Dominik and Julius grew up together, and we have known each other for 15 years,” the founders wrote. “We were all in grad school together and just moved up from Stanford.” Moehrle leads partnerships, Reinhart oversees technology and Hillebrand handles sales, according to an independent write-up of the launch that credited each by role. Moehrle is listed as Dodo's founder and de facto lead on third-party company databases.

The team went through Y Combinator's Summer 2024 batch, with Gustaf Alstromer listed as the batch's primary partner for the company on Y Combinator's own directory.

Vet clinics first, then dental and physical therapy

Dodo launched with veterinary clinics as its first customer type, a choice the founders tied to the pandemic-era pet boom and the resulting strain on vet front desks. The company's Y Combinator profile says it is “starting with veterinary clinics, and are expanding to dental and physical therapy.” By the time of a later company update on the same Y Combinator profile, the description had grown to claim the product was “powering millions of client interactions annually for hundreds of clinics” and cutting “communication overhead ~70%.” Neither figure is independently sourced, and no named clinic customer, integration partner or practice management system was found in the reporting collected for this page.

What is proven, and what is still claimed

Read plainly: the accelerator backing, the founding team and the basic product description are solid. The scale claims, the team size and most of the money are not independently confirmed, and at least one funding figure circulating for “Dodo” online almost certainly belongs to a different company that happens to share the name.

What to watch

• Whether Dodo names any clinic customer, veterinary group or practice management system integration publicly.
• A first SEC Form D, if a future round is raised under Regulation D and crosses the reporting threshold.
• Confirmation, one way or the other, of the $3 million seed and $66.6 million totals now circulating on aggregator sites.
• Progress on the stated expansion from veterinary clinics into dental and physical therapy.

In their words

Related companies

• Health Harbor: Shared investor: San Francisco Vc. A Y Combinator backed startup whose AI agent calls health insurance companies on behalf of medical clinics, chasing down benefits, prior authorizations and claim status
• Arini: Also in Healthcare IT. A voice AI receptionist built for dental practices and dental service organizations, answering calls and texts and booking appointments directly into a clinic's existing
• Clarion: Also in Healthcare IT. A New York startup building AI agents that answer the phone for clinics, then finish the task on the other end: booking, refills, referrals, billing questions, written
• Andy AI: Also in Healthcare IT. An AI ambient scribe built to turn a home health nurse's recorded visit into a completed OASIS chart

Sources

1. Accelerator recordDodo: AI agents that handle communications for clinicsY Combinator company page · accessed Sep 25, 2026
2. CompanyLaunch YC: Dodo, AI Employees for Specialized Healthcare ClinicsY Combinator launch post · 2024
3. IndependentDodo launches AI Receptionist for the medical marketplaceConversational AI News, Ewan MacLeod · Aug 16, 2024
4. IndependentYC S24’s @get_dodo develops AI receptionists for medical front desksY Combinator, X post · Aug 15, 2024
5. IndependentDodo Launches: AI Receptionists for Medical Front DesksFondo blog · accessed 2026
6. Third-party estimateDodo Revenue 2024 estimateGetLatka · accessed Sep 25, 2026
7. Funding databaseDodo Funding & Investors, Pre-Seed, San FranciscoVCBacked · last updated Sep 2024, accessed Sep 25, 2026
8. Funding databaseDodo, 2026 Funding Rounds & List of InvestorsTracxn · accessed Sep 25, 2026
9. Funding databaseDodo (YC S24), investors & fundinggritt.io · accessed Sep 25, 2026
10. Aggregator, flaggedDodo: Funding, Team & InvestorsStartup Intros · accessed Sep 25, 2026
11. Public recordSEC EDGAR company search for “Dodo,” Form D filingsSEC EDGAR · checked Sep 25, 2026
12. Public recordSEC EDGAR full text search for “Dodo” and “clinics,” Form DSEC EDGAR · checked Sep 25, 2026