A former dental hygienist is scaling her staffing management company after she learned the hard way that things could be better — for her industry and others.
"I felt like I wasn't getting treated fairly," Aisha Abdul, founder of Fairly Staffing, said of her former life in a dental clinic. "Time off was very much capped, I felt like I wasn't getting paid what I deserved, and there was no flexibility in my schedule … So I quit my job at a time where it was very scary, because I was surrounded by people that were working at the same clinic for like 20 to 30 years."
Abdul then worked for temp agencies, but she found herself double-booked for shifts and facing other irritations. To solve the kinds of problems she was encountering, she started Fairly Staffing in 2022. It is a platform to allow dental clinics to fill vacancies more efficiently and to give freelance dental workers more freedom. The platform now serves 600 dental clinics with 3,000 dental temps. And it has features such as tools for payroll and tax reporting, as well as an AI-powered "career coach" and now pay advances for workers.
"I feel like I'm hitting two birds with one stone here," Abdul told Taproot. "It's not only empowering temps, but also helping out dental offices by adding so much more value than just, you know, 'Here's a temp for the day.'"
Four years later, she counts the Accelerate Fund as an investor. Fairly Staffing is among Scale Up Canada's Edmonton50 for 2026, a list that recognizes the city's most scalable (and thus investable) companies. Fairly was also among the top 20 companies pitching for investment at Startup TNT's latest Edmonton summit.
Hiring a CEO with a successful track record helped Abdul move Fairly Staffing to that next level.
"One of the things I brought on was a product focus — 'How do we evolve this?'" said Amir Reshef, who co-founded legaltech company DealCloser and served as CEO there until 2023. "I was able to bring with myself a network of investors from my first company that invested in Fairly. Raising money is a big aspect of a startup."
Reshef said the Accelerate Fund investment is helping Fairly Staffing go where it can capitalize on demand. Ontario is a particularly attractive opportunity because of its population size and its concentration of head offices for dental support organizations, which provide administrative support such as human resources to clinics.
"We want to move up into getting more dental support organizations (as clients)," he told Taproot. "We work with a lot of clinics that belong to DSOs, but we want to work more with the head office level," he said.
Fairly Staffing CEO Amir Reshef and founder Aisha Abdul at Edmonton Unlimited, where they first met. (Supplied)
Reshef said the company plans to scale not only geographically, but also across industries. "We still need to dominate in dental," he said, "but it's so clear that even if it's a vertical that looks extremely different, there's a lot of the same challenges."
Pharmacies would be a logical choice, he added, noting there are Fairly-like competitors in the space already. Legal offices could work, too. But not everything is a fit. Fairly wants to specialize in places with regulated labour, not be the next Fiverr or Taskrabbit for random gigs.
The investment from the Accelerate Fund (the amount of which Fairly Staffing's leaders would not disclose) is meant to help unlock this growth potential. The company is ready to scale, said investment manager Arden Tse of Yaletown Partners, which manages the Accelerate Fund for the Alberta Enterprise Corporation.
"We believe that in a market where demand outstrips supply, the path to success is owning the supply," Tse told Taproot in an email. (Indeed, Reshef said, more dental hygienists are leaving the industry than entering it.)
"The gig economy is only growing bigger," Tse continued. "Fairly has the foresight to create value for both dental offices by making temp management simple, and the temp workers by helping them manage their own careers with tools and features that they won't find anywhere else. Fairly has demonstrated real value, stickiness, and speed of uptake in Alberta — the bet here is that they can replicate that go-to-market motion in other geographies."
Correction: This story has been updated to include the correct number of dental clinics and the correct number and scope of workers who use Fairly Staffing.