At the time of publication: Series A | Total funding raised: ~27mn USD
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National dental expenditure in the US is around 142bn USD annually. 80% of this is covered by Insurance and Out-of-pocket while there is Government assistance too.
There are around 200,000 practicing dentists in the United States.
Contrary to what some may believe, dental diagnosis and prescribed treatment procedures vary a lot. A recent interesting study asked 136 licensed dentists from 14 countries for their opinion on a single tooth. 20% did not agree on presence of non-metallic filings, 35% on impacted molars and 37% on recurrent decay. It got worse for other points. That's a lot of inconsistency!
Even worse, the range of costs for the monthly treatments was from 300$ to $36000!
There is increasingly abundant data available in dentistry. For example, one dataset recently was created using records of 4.5 million patients. This makes dentistry a great use case for AI. AI can help bring consistency in dentistry and vastly improve patient outcomes.
Videa Health is an AI startup that applies AI to dental X-Ray analysis to unlock insights for dentists.
Videa's ‘AI factory’ has been fed with data from millions of patient records that have been reviewed and labeled by dental experts. The company claims to have built the most diverse dataset with 100mn data points by partnering with dental support organizations, universities, clearinghouses and insurance companies.
Dentists use Videa for speedy diagnosis and treatment options. Videa supports analyses of over 15 clinical indicators, including cavities, tooth-structure loss, radiographic bone loss, calculus and periapical radiolucency. Videa also integrates with most image acquisition systems and is installed within minutes.
A dental healthcare organization can also use Videa to improve quality assurance and training for their clinical staff.
The value proposition for dentists is very good:
Higher productivity due to faster diagnosis and automated workflows mean lower costs
This is kind of like a strong 'second opinion' and hence case acceptance by patients is higher
The revenue actually increases if the dentist doesn't miss out on any necessary treatment
Patient outcomes are improved with accurate diagnosis. Heartland Dental, a dental support organization that partners with Videa has put out some public data - more lesions were detected and the accuracy (meaning fewer false positives) was higher as well.
Videa not just sells software to dentists and dental practices. They sell to insurance companies as well. This is a very good strategic choice.
Insurers independently would love to have something like Videa. In fact, insurers cover 59bn$ in dental expenditure annually.
Hence there is a lot of value if:
Fraud and inaccurate claims can be reduced
The claims review process can be automated saving time and manual effort
And Videa's AI can do both - the same capabilities that help dentists in accuracy and speed are actually transferable to address insurer pain points as well!
Usually the claims go into a queue and a reviewer takes anywhere from 1 day to 10 days to manually review the claim (which means the insurer has to also invest in people with expertise). If both time and expertise can be reduced, insurers can save a lot of money.
Videa can adjudicate incoming claims in seconds and batch approve most of them. It can send low confidence claims for manual review. Incomplete claims can automatically be flagged and sent back without having anyone looking at it.
This is great for dentists and patients too. There is faster payout to dentists and there is less ambiguity about costs.
Like I said, targeting both providers and insurers is great strategy. Insurers who use Videa will eventually demand that providers in their network also use Videa to increase accuracy and improve patient outcomes. This can also help insurers protect against overcharging by dentists.
There are opportunities for Videa to increase its lead and adoption.
I think giving Videa for free to dental colleges can help increase adoption and familiarity among future dentists and also increase the new data sets in the system.
A simple self-serve smartphone app for patients (who can click photos of their teeth and receive instant diagnosis) also can be an interesting opportunity with the promise of being a second opinion. I think self serve diagnostics (though FDA approvals might take time) is a logical extension of the capabilities Videa is already exhibiting. Self serve diagnostics can increase preventive health for hundreds of millions.
Videa is a very high potential startup to watch out for - strong headstart, proven capabilities, a good strategy of targeting both insurers and practices and a very good value proposition for both in a ~100bn$+ market.