Torch Dental – a digital all-in-one dental supply partner for dental practices – recently announced its latest funding round of $28 million, which brings total funding since inception to approximately $40 million. Health Velocity Capital led the Series B funding round with participation from existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, which led previous financing rounds, FJ Labs, Felicis Ventures, Tectonic Ventures, Raga Partners, Town Hall Ventures, and other investors.
This investment enables Torch to accelerate the digitization of procurement for dental practices across the United States, continue to grow a world-class team, and explore additional opportunities to partner with dental practices.
Khaled Boukadoum and Yassine Boukadoum started Torch when they found their dentist sister Meriem Boukadoum frustrated with keeping track of her dental products and constantly needing to negotiate to get reasonable prices. And as immigrants from Algeria, they found it odd that this sort of haggling and lack of transparency still existed in the modern U.S. healthcare system. They joined forces with software engineer Drew Werner, the son of a dental hygienist, who shared a similar passion for finding a better solution.
The company has been at the tip of the spear regarding B2B marketplace innovation. Unlike consumer marketplaces, B2B marketplaces tend to engage with incumbent supply chains, which can have advantages but also add the complexity of aligning the goals of existing stakeholders. Practices currently use pen and paper, phone calls, and emails to track and place billions of dollars of annual orders, which armies of vendor sales reps accept and process.
Torch has taken a hyper-customer-centric approach to empower dental practices to take control of their supply ordering and back-office operations digitally. Torch offers custom dashboards for practices to discover new products, manage existing supply preferences, easily centralize ordering, and control spend by getting high quality products at fair prices. This saves practices dozens of hours monthly and materially decreases costs. The team is also using artificial intelligence to drive more supply chain efficiencies and better serve customers in transitioning the space from analog to digital.
Torch is now partnered with over 2,000 dental practices and supported by industry experts and entrepreneurs like Jeffrey Slovin (Former CEO of Dentsply Sirona), Joshua Zable (Former Vice President at Dentsply Sirona), Gerard Moufflet (CEO of Acceleration International), Steve Fredette (President, Founder of Toast), Jonathan Vassil (CRO of Toast), Brian Sheth (CEO of Haveli Investments), Geoff Donaker (Former COO of Yelp), Rob Krolik (Former of CFO Yelp) among others.
KEY QUOTES:
“We’re motivated to help dentists discover, order and pay for everything they need to run their practice. It’s rare to find an opportunity to accelerate the transition from analog to digital in such a large and important supply chain.”
— Khaled Boukadoum, co-founder and Torch Dental board member
“I met the Torch team years ago and was surprised to learn that dental practices were still manually ordering supplies with limited price transparency. It seemed to make sense that the future would involve a digital ordering platform and a bit more price transparency.”
— Kent Bennett, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners and Torch Dental board member
“We’ve been impressed with how customer focused the team has been in building, which is delivering great results for their customers – we’re excited to see the adoption continue to grow in the industry.”
— Saurabh Bhansali, partner at Health Velocity Capital and Torch Dental board member
