There's something quietly transformative happening in orthodontics, though you wouldn't know it from your teenager's complaints about braces. DentalMonitoring, a Paris-based company that's been teaching algorithms to scrutinize teeth for a decade now, just pulled in €84 million (roughly $100 million) in growth funding—its first major capital injection since achieving unicorn status back in 2021.
The February 10 round, led by Lazard Elaia Capital with backing from ISALT through France's Fonds Stratégique des Transitions, comes at an interesting inflection point. DentalMonitoring finally hit operational profitability in 2025, a milestone that perhaps means more than the funding itself. It's a signal that AI-powered remote patient monitoring, long hyped in healthcare circles, might actually be finding sustainable business models in unexpected corners of medicine.
From Dental Curiosity to Clinical Mainstay
Philippe Salah founded DentalMonitoring in 2014, back when convincing patients to photograph the inside of their mouths felt like a harder sell than it does today. The platform's premise remains straightforward: patients use proprietary hardware called the ScanBox pro alongside a mobile app to capture weekly intraoral scans at home, tracking more than 60 clinical parameters without stepping into an office.
What started as a novel idea now monitors over 2 million patients across 8,000-plus registered dental professionals in 18 countries. The company employs somewhere between 501 and 1,000 people—venture-backed companies rarely pin down exact headcounts—and has processed what it claims is over 2 billion intraoral images. That's a lot of molars.
The real validation came last May, when DentalMonitoring became the first AI and machine learning software-as-a-medical-device to secure FDA De Novo approval in dentistry. These regulatory wins matter. They transform nice-to-have technologies into genuine clinical tools that insurance might actually cover. DentalMonitoring also notched EU MDR Class IIa certification in June 2024, opening European markets more fully.
The Long Wait Between Checks
This latest round arrives nearly four and a half years after DentalMonitoring's blockbuster $150 million raise in October 2021, which catapulted the company past the $1 billion valuation threshold. That made DentalMonitoring the first dental software unicorn—a distinction that sounds niche until you consider the massive orthodontic market, where millions of patients worldwide wear aligners or braces at any given time.
Back then, Merieux Equity Partners put in $90 million, Vitruvian Partners added $60 million, and Jefferies handled placement duties. The delay between that round and this one tells its own story. Growth-stage companies that reach profitability don't always need fresh capital immediately. Sometimes they're just focused on execution. Other times, market conditions make fundraising unappealing.
Lazard Elaia Capital itself is a relatively new player, launched in April 2024 as a technology and growth-focused private equity platform born from a partnership between Lazard Asset Management and Elaia Partners. ISALT's participation through the Fonds Stratégique des Transitions—which had raised over €200 million in commitments by mid-2024—reflects France's ongoing push to bolster innovative small and medium enterprises.
Embedded Everywhere (Or Trying to Be)
DentalMonitoring's strategy hinges on becoming infrastructure rather than just another software subscription. The company has spent years stitching itself into the orthodontic workflow, and those efforts seem to be paying off.
Its oldest and most significant partnership remains with Straumann Group, the Swiss dental giant that took a minority stake in 2018 and secured global distribution rights. That arrangement gave DentalMonitoring instant legitimacy and reach.
More recently, the company announced integrations with Ormco's Spark aligner system (complete with a 25% discount on monitoring fees to sweeten adoption), ClearCorrect's RemoteCare platform—which started piloting in late 2025 ahead of a broader 2026 rollout—and Angel Aligner. There are also connections to practice management systems like Dolphin, Ortho2, and Sensei Cloud, plus scanner integrations with 3Shape and Medit.
This web of partnerships matters because orthodontists, like most clinicians, resent switching between disconnected systems. If DentalMonitoring can surface alerts and recommendations directly within tools doctors already use daily, adoption becomes almost frictionless.
The company operates a usage-based SaaS model where practices pay monitoring fees tied to actual patient scans. The AI engine triggers notifications when it spots problems—an ill-fitting aligner, a loose bracket—and suggests when patients should schedule office visits. It's preventative medicine, algorithmically delivered.
Beyond Borders, Into Brazil and Beyond
So what happens with this fresh €84 million? International expansion tops the list, naturally. DentalMonitoring plans to deepen its presence in the U.S., Europe, Australia, and Japan while pushing into Brazil, Turkey, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. Orthodontics is a global business, after all, and aligners have become surprisingly universal.
The funding will also fuel continued AI development and further integrations across what the company calls the "orthodontic digital ecosystem"—a bit of jargon, but not inaccurate. DentalMonitoring acquired Loum, a digital assistant app focused on patient engagement and gamification, back in May 2020. Those features, which nudge patients to stay compliant with their treatment plans, have become table stakes.
The Bigger Question
Whether remote monitoring fundamentally changes orthodontic care or simply adds convenience remains an open question. Skeptics note that nothing replaces hands-on clinical judgment, and that algorithms trained on millions of images can still miss nuances a skilled orthodontist catches immediately.
But DentalMonitoring's profitability—and its ability to attract growth capital in a tough funding environment—suggests the company has moved past the science experiment phase. It's now a business that works, at least financially. Whether it meaningfully improves patient outcomes at scale, well, that's a longer study. One that will take more than algorithms to answer.
