There are giants in the burgeoning world of Artificial Intelligence, making world-changing promises about what they’ll achieve with their hundreds of billions in capital expense. And then there are smaller companies, showing pragmatic ways to build businesses with AI.
Broadly speaking, these small but mighty outfits break into two categories, the vertical and the horizontal. The verticals focus on the essential characteristics of a particular industry, then learn the ways that AI can best serve those customers. Along the way they learn much that can be applied to adjacent categories. The horizontals take a critical aspect of AI that can appeal to many businesses, then figure out how best to outmaneuver the competition.
At March Capital’s Montgomery Summit, presented in Santa Monica at the beginning of March, I interviewed excellent representatives of both AI approaches. The vertical company was called Overjet, while the horizontal company was Nile Networks.
Overjet focuses on dental practices across the U.S. These are typically firms with anywhere from one to a handful of practitioners, with small staffs to handle all the administrative work, customers who come from nearby and want a trusted, relation-based service, and a need to keep cash flowing smoothly. Its founder, Wardah Inam, has extensive experience in Machine Learning, generative AI, and associated data and AI technologies. She began to develop Overjet after visiting two different dentists, who put her on two entirely different courses of treatment.
“Neither one was wrong, exactly,” she recalls, “but it showed me how individual each experience was,” and how dentists themselves differed over how to do their jobs. What if she built something to help?
In fact, Overjet grew to address three separate dimensions of the business: The practitioner, the patient, and the administrative operations. For the dentist, Overjet uses AI to help analyze data like X-ray information, indicating anomalies and what they likely mean, and providing access to other information about treatment. Part of what makes this defensible is that Wardah’s team build their own foundational models, with much higher accuracy than you’ll find from big players.
Patients get a machine-driven report, including illustrations, about what’s going on with them, and what the treatment will consist of. On the administration side, insurers get faster and clearer filings, meaning dentists get paid faster, and functions like calendaring can be automated.
You can think of it as lowering friction and increasing peace of mind at the three key points of the business. And, since the dentists are small companies in the same field, they have online communities where they compare notes, meaning there’s strong word of mouth supporting the product. Wardah is thinking about adjacent businesses like optometry and podiatry, where Overjet might also help.
Nile Networks, which takes the horizontal approach, produces “networking in the cloud,” a low-touch software based networking system that serves local area networks (LANs) anywhere from the size of a small office to a large corporate or college campus. The business has been steadily growing through its proposition of fast install, low maintenance connectivity that can be running in hours, instead of days. In the age of AI, though, Nile’s unique security proposition has supercharged the business.
“Right away that changed our sales motion,” says Pankaj Patel, cofounder and CEO of Nile. “Security is a concern for the CEO and CFO of a company, along with the CISO and the CIO. They’re all worried, and they all want a solution that just works, today.”
While most of the security industry is focused on big areas of interaction, like the cloud and the data center, Pankaj says, there’s less focus on the LAN, which is an even bigger potential area for penetration and attack of a corporate system.
Nile uses lots of agentic AI, in areas ranging from identity and workflows to hardware and software integrity. Being a highly automated system, there’s much less opportunity for hackers to exploit human error and human vulnerability, traditionally two of the most common ways the bad guys gain entry.
As a result of its security focus, Patel says, Nile’s ARR is expected to grow 3-5x. “I can now see us crossing the chasm” from an advanced product to trusted mainstream use, he adds.
It’s always exciting to see young companies succeeding and growing. In a world where so much is changing on the technology side, it’s also good to see key critical basics, like customer and technology understanding, fulfilling both strategic and emotional customer needs, and addressing problems that matter at the highest levels, still matter most of all.
By Guest Author, Quentin Hardy, Principal, LGTM LLC Communications Services
Overjet’s full session at Monty2026 available here: https://youtu.be/T2Z0oa65VCs
Nile’s full session at Monty2026 available here: https://youtu.be/AQ8cxPByZaY
