oral-health
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The Next Health Wearable May Be Hiding in Your Mouth
Lura Health is building a sensor small enough to disappear inside a retainer - and ambitious enough to turn saliva into a continuous stream of health data.
Haleon
The company you have never heard of makes the toothpaste, painkillers and vitamins you buy without thinking. Here is how GSK's cast-off brands became a £30 billion bet on self-care.
Bento
Bento is a Boston-based dental benefits technology company that replaces traditional dental insurance with a transparent, self-funded model. Its patented, AI-powered platform connects employers, associations, dentists and DSOs with real-time claims adjudication, customizable plan design and in-office membership plans. The only dental benefits solution endorsed by the American Dental Association, Bento says it can cut employer dental costs by 20-40% while giving members access to hundreds of thousands of provider access points nationwide.
Retrace
Retrace is a San Francisco AI company rebuilding the plumbing of dental insurance. Founded in 2016 by dentist-engineer Dr. Ali Sadat, it operates what it calls the first natively-built AI healthcare clearinghouse - a network that reads X-rays and clinical records, compares proposed procedures against millions of adjudicated cases, and lets payers, providers and patients see coverage, cost and payout in real time so claims settle in seconds instead of weeks. Backed by Intel Capital and SoftBank, Retrace has raised roughly $18 million to automate the paperwork that sits between a dentist's chair and an insurer's check.
Healthentic
Healthentic is a Seattle-based health analytics company that turns big health data into actionable insights for health plans and dental organizations. Its reporting tools - including the Dental Action Report, Plan Action Report, and Opioid Report - help payers and benefits teams understand utilization, risk, and provider performance, benchmark against state and national norms, and target outreach to the populations that need it most. The company started by exploring the link between medical and dental data and evolved into a focused engine for improving care while controlling cost.
ONVI, LLC.
ONVI is a Chicago-based oral health technology company building what it calls an operating system for dental care. Founded by dentist Dr. Craig S. Kohler, the company pairs camera-equipped brushes - led by the Prophix video toothbrush - with a HIPAA-compliant software platform, ONView, that links what people see in their own mouths to their dentists. In August 2025 ONVI launched a $25 million Series A to commercialize a six-product hardware-and-software system aimed at closing the visibility gap between dental visits.
Nichole Garcia
Nichole Garcia is Co-Founder and President of OrthoFX, the doctor-delivered clear aligner startup she built with two former Invisalign executives. With a BS in Biochemistry from UCLA, an MBA from Pepperdine, and a diploma from Oxford, she spent two decades running global divisions at Philips Oral Care and Align Technology before co-founding OrthoFX in 2017. The company raised $17M total - including a $13M Series A led by SignalFire in 2020 - to commercialize a proprietary FXTetra polymer that delivers 50% faster treatment, paired with an AI-powered remote monitoring platform called FXOnTrack.