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Exciting news about AI applications in dentistry has been frequent. For example, this month, Boston-based innovative company Perceptive announced that an AI-controlled fully automated robot performed a complete dental restoration surgery on a human patient for the first time, taking 15 minutes, which is about 8 times faster than human dentists. This has sparked widespread industry discussion on whether dental AI robots will replace dentists or become important assistants to dentists.
On the other hand, ### capital's favor towards dental AI companies is increasing, with the largest financing record being repeatedly broken. In July, a company called Pearl announced the completion of a $58 million (equivalent to about 416 million RMB) Series B financing, led by Left Lane Capital, with participation from Smash Capital, Alpha Partners, and existing investors Craft Ventures and Neotribe Ventures - this financing amount broke the new record for dental AI track financing set by Overjet earlier this year ($53.2 million).
It's worth noting that the dental industry has always been a "small but beautiful" track. According to several dental industry investors who previously told VCBeat, in the dental industry, single equity financings exceeding $40 million (or 300 million RMB) are relatively rare, and only a few leading companies can get such high financing amounts after achieving certain commercial success.
The enthusiasm of capital undoubtedly shows that the dental AI track has reached a turning point, and the industry is about to enter a stage of rapid growth.
01 Has AI really started to revolutionize the dental industry?
Since the AI boom around 2015, dentistry has become an important scenario for many companies to enter. However, due to the lack of substantial improvements to the industry before, dental AI has been lukewarm.
"In the past few years, the application of AI in the dental field was very scattered, more often it was some upstream equipment or consumables companies introducing related technologies to improve the intelligence of their own products," an investment director of a RMB fund, Wu Guang (pseudonym at the interviewee's request) told VCBeat. "For example, as an industry leader, Align Technology, the parent company of the invisible orthodontic brand Invisalign, started using AI very early. Its product Invisalign® provides doctors with a set of remote monitoring solutions, integrating AI technology to help doctors manage patients' wearing progress."
At the same time, some AI customer acquisition software led by information technology companies also emerged. Based on the past user data accumulated in the background of dental institutions or the data from social media platforms, they analyze potential user profiles to provide operational guidance for dental institutions and help with customer acquisition.
"The emergence of these AI systems has indeed brought some changes to the industry, but it's far from meeting expectations," Wu Guang believes. Unlike AI's previous applications in the financial field or the huge changes brought by large models in fields such as text-to-image generation, AI has not penetrated particularly deeply in the dental field, and its applications are too isolated. ### "What the industry expects more is that AI can participate in the entire process from oral disease prevention, screening, assisted diagnosis, to treatment plan design and patient follow-up, to improve efficiency."
In other words, the role AI assumes is an important assistant to dentists or can reconstruct the entire process of dental clinics, that is, to create AI dental assistants or build AI intelligent dental clinics.
Things can't be achieved overnight. Regarding this, Wu Guang and his team roughly divided the development of dental AI into three major stages and classified standards for each stage.
"We judge that the key to whether dental AI can be commercialized on a large scale is whether it can truly benefit downstream dental institutions," Wu Guang believes. In the first stage, upstream manufacturers' use of AI can indeed make products better and benefit patients, but downstream institutions can hardly see AI's contribution to short-term revenue growth, so only some large equipment manufacturers bet on AI, while other dental AI companies in the industry progress slowly commercially due to lack of buyers.
Changes are happening. Currently, some AI dental companies have come up with AI products with more substantial effects, and the dental AI track is gradually crossing the first stage and moving towards the second stage.
"From the perspective of dental AI companies (Overjet, Pearl) that have received two large financings this year, ### their business of assisting dentists in seeing patients through AI has indeed increased the income of dental institutions, which gives downstream buyers more motivation to invest more funds in the construction of AI systems," Wu Guang said.
According to a recent study by VideaAl on 100 dental clinics in the United States, involving 470,000 dental patients, through AI supporting dentists to identify diseases earlier and provide second opinions to patients, the average annual net productivity of dental clinics increased significantly by 13%.
At the same time, ### the speed of this dental AI robot performing a full set of dental surgeries is about 8 times that of human dentists, which further shows the dental industry that an efficiency revolution is coming. It's worth noting that dentists have a long training cycle and have always been a scarce medical resource. The breakthrough of dental AI robots will become a powerful assistant to dentists, filling this gap.
This seems to indicate that the dental AI track has reached a turning point.
02 How are dental AI companies at the forefront pushing for change?
As dental AI enters a new stage, leading companies in the field are trying to assist in diagnosis and treatment (such as assisting dentists in seeing patients, AI surgical robots), precise customer acquisition (such as conversation analysis systems), and improving production intelligence (such as dental manufacturing automation).
Among them, ### assisted diagnosis and treatment is the hottest area for capital betting, including AI's intelligent analysis and diagnosis of various modal data, applied to disease imaging analysis, providing auxiliary decision-making, intelligent diagnostic reports, etc. Currently, innovative companies such as Pearl, Overjet, Videa Health, Lingjiankang, and DeepCare Yuyi Ganlan are laying out in this area.
For example, Pearl, which has secured the largest financing record in dental AI history this time, aims to use AI technology to help dentists read patients' X-rays, thereby providing patients with more accurate, consistent, and understandable diagnostic reports.
Specifically, Pearl has developed a real-time dental AI platform called Second Opinion, which can automatically detect multiple symptoms in X-rays, including but not limited to cavities, tartar, and periapical abscesses and other common dental conditions, and provide dentists with a second opinion to improve the accuracy of radiological diagnosis.
From the patient's perspective, unlike traditional dental diagnosis and treatment processes, when patients undergo basic examinations at dental clinics, if the dentist determines that X-ray imaging is needed, the Second Opinion platform will participate in the analysis - ### after the X-ray is taken, it only takes a few seconds for Second Opinion's diagnostic analysis results to come out, and it can detect some small signs of periodontal disease that were difficult to check before. This not only greatly saves examination time but also makes the examination results more detailed. Currently, Second Opinion has become the first FDA-approved chairside AI software in the industry and has been named one of the Best Inventions by TIME magazine, and has received regulatory approval in 120 countries/regions.
In terms of commercial implementation, Pearl's technology is used by dental clinics on six continents and has covered over 500,000 dental clinics and millions of dental professionals worldwide. At the same time, global expansion has brought tremendous help to Pearl's continued revenue growth. According to foreign media reports, ### in 2023, Pearl's revenue grew by 458%.
Overjet, which secured $53.2 million in financing earlier this year, is similar to Pearl in business direction, both using AI in the diagnosis and treatment end, that is, assisting dentists in seeing patients. The difference is that Overjet introduces more accurate diagnostic opinions into the payment process, helping patients save time costs for claims, and helping insurance companies control costs.
In detail, different experts often give different interpretations of the same dental X-ray, which can lead to poor communication between doctors, insurance companies, and patients, making patients less trusting of dentists, and insurance companies unable to determine whether to pay, ultimately leading to patients refusing treatment. After Overjet's intervention, with its AI platform trained on millions of cases and the participation of a large team of clinical experts, the diagnostic results are more precise.
According to FDA research, almost every general dentist can more accurately detect cavities and tartar when using Overjet, and get nearly consistent results. The benefit of this is that based on consistent diagnostic opinions, patients are more confident in the dentist's treatment, and insurance companies can ensure payment.
Domestic innovative companies are also making efforts in this direction. For example, Lingjiankang has launched AI dental viewing, which can display, record, and analyze results within 5 seconds based on patient imaging data through AI algorithms. According to Lingjiankang's official website, AI dental viewing has been connected to imaging equipment of more than 50 brands, supporting automatic transmission of imaging data to the company's another product, the e-dental viewing system, after outpatient imaging.
In the diagnosis and treatment end, the emergence of AI surgical robots has brought more possibilities. "In the dental industry, there have been many surgical robots, especially in the direction of dental implants, but robots that can achieve scalable fully automated treatment methods are particularly rare," Wu Guang said. Currently, in terms of fully automated treatment methods, there are only a few innovative companies such as Perceptive, which are using AI to enable surgical robots to achieve full-process operations for some dental surgeries and greatly compress surgery time, which is revolutionary for the dental industry.
Specifically, Perceptive's AI surgical robot uses handheld three-dimensional volumetric scanning