Company

# How we started

Before Sixmonth there was iolokis, a research project on the work in dentistry that is not the patient

Author: Dr Fady Abboud and Joe Hachem

Left to right: Fady, Co-Founder and CEO, and Joe, Co-Founder and CTO.

## We started in 2023

From the beginning we set out to solve one problem: the work in dentistry that is not the patient is draining the teams who do it. Looking things up, writing the same note twice, chasing a record across three systems. None of it is care, and all of it lands on the people who should be with the patient.

We gave that research a name, **iolokis**, and one direction. Our approach was rooted in natural language from the first day, aiming at a single end goal: a dentist should be able to simply speak to their machine.

## May 2023: a robot in the operatory

We started with hardware. The first prototypes were assistive robots, built to support dentists during procedures.

![The io-arm prototype, a white robotic arm, on a table next to a mannequin head wearing a headset](https://www.sixmonth.ai/assets/articles/io-arm-prototype.jpg)

io-arm, prototype 1, May 2023.

The work moved from physical robotics to an intelligent tool storage system with a data layer built into it. The arm was the part people noticed. The data underneath it was the part that mattered.

## January 2025: SOFIA

Our first real priority became voice: hands-free access to data for a dentist who is gloved up and cannot touch a keyboard. That became SOFIA, a voice-activated dental assistant.

It worked, and it taught us something uncomfortable. Building another dental system was not going to lift the burden our users actually carry.

## April 2025: Scribe

Next came Scribe, which transcribes the conversation in the room in real time and turns it into immediate actions, with a retrieval layer that brings up the patient data that matters in that moment.

It worked too. But our goal was never to build one more co-pilot, and one more co-pilot would not get dentistry where we believed it had to go.

## Then we stopped

We paused. We went back to the people we were building for, sat with them again, and asked ourselves what problem we were actually here to solve.

## What we kept

We believe the clinics of the future will run on an intelligent brain: one that takes care of the operations around care and brings a human in only when it truly needs one.

Whatever systems a clinic already uses, it needs a partner that understands the team and takes the weight off it. Not another tool. A co-worker. That is what three years of iolokis research left us with.

Written with heart, Fady and Joe.