Dental care is a necessity, yet many patients lack confidence in their dentists’ ability to provide accurate diagnoses and appropriate treatments. Some dentists overtreat patients, leading to unnecessary expenses, while others may miss critical issues that could develop into more significant and costly problems in the future.
While seeking a second opinion from another dentist can help patients feel more confident in their treatment plans, this option isn’t always practical due to time constraints or additional costs.
Dentists are well aware of this problem, and that’s why their practices are increasingly willing to buy AI-powered software that uses computer vision to identify dental disease on X-rays.
Pearl, one of only three startups that has an FDA clearance to use AI to assist dentists make accurate diagnoses and provide patients with a “second opinion,” announced on Wednesday that it raised a $58 million Series B round led by Left Lane Capital with participation from Smash Capital, Alpha Partners, and existing investors, Craft Ventures and Neotribe Ventures.
Ophir Tanz, the company’s founder and CEO, incubated Pearl inside GumGum, a computer vision startup serving sports and advertising franchises, which he co-founded in 2007. GumGum was looking to expand its machine learning capabilities into healthcare, and Tanz, whose father was a dentist, quickly settled on the field as one that could benefit from AI-powered diagnosis. (Pearl spun out of GumGum in 2019.)
AI can standardize how dentists interpret X-rays, and there’s a significantly larger dataset of dental images available to train AI models compared to other body parts, Tanz said.
Pearl claims that dentists who use the startup’s diagnostic software see on average a 30% boost in patients agreeing to recommended treatments. Tanz explained that Pearl can help patients visualize their dental problems more clearly than on a traditional X-ray, but the tool is not meant to replace the dentist’s judgment.
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“We are highlighting areas of interest, we’re providing recommendations, but it’s up to the doctors to check things clinically and make a final call,” he said.
Pearl’s revenue grew 458% in 2023, and Tanz is expecting that the company will continue to grow quickly.
“We believe this will be an absolute standard of care globally in, I used to say, five years,” he said. “Now I think it will be in three years. There’s a massive amount of global adoption now.”
Pearl competes with two other startups that received an FDA clearance for similar capabilities: Video Health and Overjet, which raised a $53 million Series C at a $550 million valuation in March.
