Daria Ansh, Founder of Veery, is building safer cosmetic dentistry with Cofounder

Daria Ansh is the CEO and solo founder of Veery, an AI platform that helps people access safe and affordable cosmetic dentistry. We selected Daria out of a pool of over 3,000 applicants to be one of our first ever General Intelligence Fellows to build Veery on Cofounder.

Daria immigrated to the United States to study data science, moved to San Francisco, and spent the better part of a decade watching "machine learning" transform into the generative AI tools we know today. After working at a startup, then working extensively with healthcare data during her graduate years, she began to see just how many structural flaws exist within the American cosmetic dentistry industry.

Daria broke her front teeth as a child and spent years on temporary fixes. When the pandemic hit and masks gave her cover, she decided she would finally fix her teeth once and for all. She went to a dentist in Los Angeles known for his celebrity clientele, who convinced her she needed more veneers than she originally wanted. She was hesitant, but she trusted him and paid up.

When she saw the results, she was gutted. Her new teeth looked like dentures and completely changed the way she spoke. When she went back to say something was off, he dismissed her concerns as a difference in aesthetic taste. She tried a second dentist, who was not formally trained in veneers but worked with them anyway. Her second set of new teeth looked better, but they were still off. By that point she had spent roughly $70,000. Her plight is not unique either; in one analysis, 58.2% of failed ceramic veneers were replaced because of errors in veneer size and shape and another 21.1% were replaced due to esthetic issues like discoloration and shade mismatch. This means that nearly 80% of documented veneer failures in the study could have been prevented if better care had been paid to their making and placement.

Top cosmetic dentists in the U.S. routinely charge up to $5,000 per veneer, and for patients chasing that level of work, a full-mouth smile makeover often ends up in the $60,000 to $100,000 range. Any licensed general dentist in the U.S. can offer veneers without a dedicated cosmetic specialty credential, and consumer protections are patchy; many patients struggle to get legal recourse for poor esthetic outcomes unless they can show clear negligence or lasting injury.

Disappointed with cosmetic dentistry in the U.S., Daria started to do her own research. She cold-emailed professors at dental schools to understand how veneer work is actually performed. She traced the entire supply chain all the way through, and uncovered how the most famous cosmetic dentists in the US maintain their edge.

What she found was that ceramists, the craftspeople who physically fabricate veneers and determine whether they look natural or not, underpin the entire cosmetic dentistry industry. The best cosmetic dentists in the US often work with master ceramists based abroad — in Brazil, Ukraine, and Germany — where the artistry is world-class but the prices are low. A dentist in New York charges $5,000 per tooth and carries a multi-year waitlist, while their ceramist in Brazil charges only $300 per tooth.

At first glance, it seems like it would be simple to go around the dentist and find the ceramist yourself, but cosmetic dentistry (especially at the global level) is poorly understood and under-regulated. Cosmetic dentists justify their pricing by sorting through a global network that is riddled with scammers to find the ceramists at the top of their field. They maintain their status as the best cosmetic dentists in the nation, because they have the best suppliers in the world.

In the wake of this discovery, Daria flew to São Paulo to see Guilherme Rocha, a Brazilian dentist who worked with a master ceramist. They completed her case in five days without sacrificing care or precision, and the total cost was a fraction of what she had already spent in the US. When she got home, everyone wanted to know how she did it. After becoming the go-to person for veneer information in SF, she decided to build Veery.

Veery is an AI platform that matches patients with vetted cosmetic dentist and ceramist teams worldwide. The vetting framework covers case history, material expertise, ceramist collaboration quality, and infection-control standards. Most of the people who find Veery have already been through a bad outcome. They spent money, got hurt, and are trying to figure out what to do next. For many of them, Daria says, the mental health dimension is significant; these outcomes dramatically impact how someone looks, speaks, and appears in photos for the next 10 to 20 years.

As a General Intelligence Fellow, Daria used Cofounder to build out Veery's vetting framework as a systematic process rather than an informal list. She structured her outreach around the same signals that define reputation in the industry: which ceramists a dentist works with, how consistently their before-and-after cases hold up visually, what materials they use and why, and how consistently patients report outcomes that match what was promised. Cofounder helps her move through this process at scale; it keeps a live log of every provider conversation, prompts the right follow-up questions, and surfaces discrepancies between what a dentist claims and what shows up in their public case record or patient feedback.

Every provider who clears the automated screen is contacted directly. Daria or a trusted advisor in her network speaks with them, reviews their ceramist relationships, and checks infection-control and sterilization standards before any provider goes live on Veery. The result is a two-stage filter; AI finds the candidates worth talking to, then humans decide who actually gets listed. As a result, Veery has built a small, high-trust network rather than an open directory.

Veery benefits from the fact that the best cosmetic dentists tend to cluster together: they refer each other clients, follow each other's work, and share a small pool of top ceramists. The platform maps those visible relationships across the open internet and social networks, then layers in hard signals like case galleries, patient reviews, training background, and years of experience to identify likely standouts. The result is a living map of the cosmetic dentistry supply chain where algorithms surface patterns and experts make the final calls, designed to minimize patient risk rather than just maximize volume.

Daria firmly believes that veneers are not a side show; dental veneers are a multi-billion market globally, and the broader opportunity within cosmetic dentistry is even bigger. As veneer demand compounds and cosmetic dentistry spending accelerates, Veery will use AI — always grounded in human verification — to catch that wave and quietly bend the curve toward better outcomes.

Cofounder is built to handle the volume that comes with that growth. As demand scales, recurring workflows run automatically so Daria isn't stuck drowning in manual processes every time the business moves faster.

Start a business like Daria with Cofounder, and explore Veery at veery.co.