What is Zalto?
Zalto Inc. is an AI software studio in Mississauga, Ontario, founded in 2026 by Alejandro Zuluaga. It builds and runs AI software for operators in underserved verticals: private-pay clinics, local businesses, churches, and trades. The studio ships its own products, Menchi and Field Quote among them, and builds custom systems through a five-gate engagement discipline.
What is Menchi?
Menchi is Zalto's flagship product: an AI patient concierge for private-pay aesthetics clinics such as med spas, cosmetic dermatology, plastics, and cosmetic dentistry. It answers every call and chat, books appointments, sends confirmations, and follows up, escalating anything clinical or sensitive to the clinic's own team. It runs as a managed service on a live voice line.
What is Zalto Studio?
Zalto Studio is the studio's offering for local businesses: a website built to book, plus an always-on AI that answers calls and questions when the owner cannot. It is built in days, launched on the client's own domain, and handed over with full ownership. It serves bakeries, salons, trades, and the small businesses agencies overlook.
Who owns the software Zalto builds?
The client does. Sites launch on the client's domain under the client's accounts, custom builds are documented and handed over, and the five-gate process ends with the client's team trained to run the system without Zalto. Ongoing support is available by choice. Dependence is not the business model, outcomes are.
What are the Five Gates?
Every Zalto project passes through five gates: Qualification (free, both sides confirm fit), Outcomes Agreement (define done before any build), Architecture (grounded, auditable design), Deployment and Handover (tested, documented, team trained), and a 30-Day Check-In measured against the agreed outcomes. Any project can stop at a gate. That discipline is the product guarantee.
How much does an engagement cost?
Gate 1, the qualification call, is always free. After that, pricing is set per outcome in the Outcomes Agreement, not per hour, so the quote states what will exist when the work is done. Studio website builds and Menchi subscriptions have standard pricing discussed on the first call. No surprise invoices, ever.
Is Zalto's AI safe for patient data?
Data handling is designed before anything ships. Deployments are architected with Canadian privacy law, including PIPEDA, in view; data collection is minimal by design; and clinics with stricter needs can opt for private, data-sovereign deployments where information never leaves infrastructure they control. The rule is simple: collect what the booking needs, nothing speculative.
Can AI replace my staff?
No, and Zalto will not sell it that way. The studio's thesis is AI on the perimeter, human in the core: automation takes the interruptions, the after-hours calls, and the repetitive follow-ups, while people keep the judgment, the relationships, and the craft. The moat of a good business is human. Software should widen it.
Where is Zalto located?
Zalto Inc. is a federally incorporated Canadian company based in Mississauga, Ontario, serving the Greater Toronto Area in person and clients across Canada remotely. Healthcare operations experience in the region runs a decade deep. For GTA clinics and local businesses, an in-person walk-through is part of the offer, not an upsell.
How fast does Zalto ship?
Studio websites ship in days. Menchi onboarding typically runs a few weeks, because tuning against real call traffic matters more than a fast invoice. Custom builds are scoped honestly at the Outcomes Agreement gate: the answer is a date tied to a definition of done, not a vague quarter.
What is Field Quote?
Field Quote is a shipped Zalto product for trades: photo and voice memo in, branded PDF quote with an e-sign link out. It exists because tradespeople lose their evenings to paperwork that a system should do. It is live at fieldquote.me and stands as proof the studio ships real products, not decks.
What happened to Kairos?
Kairos is church operations software Zalto built for Hope Bible Church in Oakville: family tracking, food bank inventory, and back-office work pastors should not do by hand. It now runs in the hands of the church's own team, which is the point. Zalto builds systems clients can own and operate without us.
Why does Zalto exist?
Because the founder believes work is a way to serve. Zalto was started from conviction: that faith, for Alejandro, means building things that genuinely make someone's business and life better, and that operators overlooked by big software deserve craftsmanship too. Outcomes over outputs is not a slogan. It is a belief about what work is for.