A pair of sisters have launched their third startup since leaving investment bank Goldman Sachs.
India and Portia Healy O’Connor have raised £2.25 million pre-seed funding to scale Linda AI, an agentic technology which is already live in 50 sites in the UK and Ireland, across the dentistry industry.
The former Goldman Sachs sales and trading professionals grew up around their father’s medical practice, gaining early insight into the operational strain faced by healthcare clinics.
Their first startup was Xelda, formerly a cashless payments platform and now a developer of pre-accounting automation payments, which is backed by Sequoia Capital and the founders of Irish unicorn Flipdish.
Their second business, Curie, is an AI transcription programme aimed at the medical sector which counts their father Dr Hugh O’ Connor as chief medical officer.
Curie founding engineer Lucio Tudisco, who previously built enterprise systems at Amazon, Patreon, and Circle, has also joined them at Linda AI.
Dental practices continue to rely heavily on phone calls to manage appointments – yet more than 25% of inbound calls are missed. This represents over £8,000 in lost monthly revenue for a typical four-surgery clinic.
They are now increasingly looking to leverage voice AI to convert missed calls into confirmed bookings and reduce no-show rates. Linda AI’s voice agents are available 24/7, handling overflow, after-hours, and outbound calls to complete bookings, confirmations, and rescheduling workflows end-to-end within existing practice management systems.
“A lot of missed bookings come down to capacity,” said CEO India, who is married to Gloucester and former Ireland rugby player Ross Byrne. “Linda handles inbound calls when front desks are stretched, so clinics don’t miss opportunities while teams focus on patients in the chair.”
The round was led by 6 Degrees Capital and will be used to expand the engineering team, grow the senior sales function, and scale deployments across additional dental practices in Ireland and the UK.
“Voice AI agents are taking markets by storm, rapidly transforming industries through improved operational efficiency and customer experience,” said Christina Franzeskides, principal at 6 Degrees Capital.
“The dental sector is particularly attractive because it is operating at full demand but is constrained by front-desk capacity. Linda AI addresses this bottleneck by using voice AI that integrates seamlessly into existing practice operations, rather than attempting to replace front-desk teams, delivering clear ROI for practices and enabling them to meaningfully increase revenue.
“We are thrilled to partner with Linda AI, and were drawn to them from our very first meeting with the founders at a female-founder dinner. As sisters, they have highly complementary skill sets and have demonstrated a rare combination of focus, execution strength, and unique team synergy – one we have rarely seen in other founding teams.
“We were especially impressed by the speed at which they secured early partnerships with dental practices, demonstrating their ability to execute. We are committed to supporting Linda AI in becoming a category winner, and believe the company is uniquely positioned to win in this rapidly evolving space.”