Inside The Dental Tech Revolution With Dr. Jeremy Krell

Jonathan Moffat sits down with Dr. Jeremy Krell, general dentist, startup operator, and Managing Partner at Revere Partners, to explore how tech revolution, digital innovation, and venture capital are reshaping dentistry. They break down the difference between private equity and venture capital, what Revere looks for when investing in dental tech, and why the next wave of growth will come from doctors who understand and adopt these innovations early. From AI to robotics to regenerative implants, Jeremy shares a behind-the-scenes look at the technologies shaping the future of the profession.

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Inside The Dental Tech Revolution With Dr. Jeremy Krell

I’m so happy to have Dr. Jeremy Krell join us. Jeremy, it’s good to see you again, my friend. It’s always a pleasure. Normally, we see each other in person at different dental events, so it’s nice to actually be able to sit down with you and not in the hallway where every three seconds, someone’s coming by saying hi, and you can actually hear each other and we can get into some good stuff. Thanks for being here.

It’s great to be here. Thank you so much for having me. Really excited for our conversation and it’s great to see you in another setting as well.

Always knowledgeable, always fun, always at the forefront of the latest and most interesting innovative tech that’s happening in dental. I’m really excited to get into our conversations here. I’ve been looking forward to this episode for a while. Thanks again for being here. A little bit about Jeremy. Just so everyone knows, Jeremy is the real deal.

It’s Dr. Jeremy Krell. Jeremy is a General Dentist. He is an operator and innovator, shaping the future of dentistry through innovation and strategic capital. As Managing Partner of Revere Partners, the first independent venture capital firm focused on oral health. He’s overseeing more than 40 ventures, played the key role in the IPO of Oscar Health and helped Quip become a VC-backed unicorn. Jeremy also chairs the board at the High Point University Workman School of Dental Medicine and serves in multiple leadership roles across the industry.

Difference Between Venture Capital And Private Equity

That’s how I’ve always known you, Jeremy. We met, I think, originally years ago as you guys were launching Revere Partners, and all the really cool stuff you guys are doing there. Let’s jump into this. I think a really good question is what is private equity? What’s venture capital? What’s the difference between venture capital versus private equity versus a different type of individual or investment?

Let me start with why we are here, and then I’ll answer the PE versus VC question. We started as a doctor and industry-driven organization. We’re here to make an impact in oral health and oral health technology. We see a world where we want to redefine healthcare with oral health included. There’s a lot of talk of oral systemic health links, but how do we do that? One way is through technology.

We’re here to drive affordability and accessibility to care, 350 million aging Americans, 200,000 dentists, 150,000 practices, roughly. Those are huge care gaps. We have to be able to fill that with something other than just hands. Technology’s a driving factor there. Last but not least, advancing the science and technology in the industry.

We do plenty well at lab-based research and IP generation, but I think we all know that delivering a product or a service into the hands, ultimately, of a practice, a provider, a patient, that involves an innovation process and a commercialization process, those things just don’t happen overnight. They just don’t happen without a lot of effort and focus on them.

We’re here as an organization to really help spin innovation in dental technology. We’ve become obsessed with the technology in the space and supporting and enabling our industry stakeholders with it. To answer private equity versus venture capital, this is a very common question that we get. Obviously, our industry has a lot of private equity influence. These certain types of funds that are buying state minority or majority or complete stakes in dental practice organizations, they form these dental support organizations, DSOs, creating management companies that provide nonclinical business support. They’re consolidating dental practices.

We see this trend in dental. It’s been going on for many years. It will continue, but it is very different from what we do. Private equity and venture capital are both forms of private investment is really the best way to understand it, but they differ significantly in the target companies that they go after, the investment strategies that they deploy and the risk profiles that they look at.

Digging into one of those different subcategories, the target companies, for example, as I just referenced, the dental practices in this case is, PE firms will typically invest in established companies. They have a proven track record, they have stable cashflow, they may be underperforming or need restructuring, or they may be at their near full potential, but they’re looking for businesses that are, generally speaking, stable that they can take to the next stage, which is a more predictable stage for those types of funds.

Venture capital fund and venture style investments are doing very different things in terms of target companies. They’re looking to target earlier-stage companies, often considered a startup. That’s a broad spectrum, meaning they have innovative ideas or technologies or inventions, things that are totally new versus innovation, doing something that’s existing better.

There’s limited operational and financial history there. These firms are taking on some higher risk for the potential exposure to exponential growth and explosive returns. The VC firms are investing in different innovative industries. It could be tech or biotech or clean tech or longevity or whatever it may be. These are areas that are emerging at an earlier stage and higher risk in exchange for a higher return. I think that’s a pretty good place to start in terms of understanding the difference between the two.

Criteria In Choosing Companies To Invest In

Do you guys get approached by these companies like, “Jeremy, want you to invest in our tech?” Are you out proactively looking for companies that you want to invest in? How do you decide what companies to invest in or to partner with in through with Revere?

There are two answers in there. There’s the sourcing and then there’s the diligence, or how do we come to a decision about what we invest in? On the sourcing side, our team has worked extremely hard over the years or so to build a brand that had reputational recognition in the space, especially among the founder community. We wanted to become the household brand, so to speak, in dental technology, to be the source of funding and innovation in this space.

We’re in a position where we’ve diligenced over 1,500, maybe over 1,600 now, different dental technology companies, software, FinTech, biotech, MedTech, mostly B2B companies that are used by a provider. They could be Seed C plus, Series A plus, Series B stage companies. Generally speaking, they are now applying to us organically. We don’t outbound source or scrape them from anywhere. We get about three applications per day of the year sitting between 200 and 250 deals roughly per quarter. There’s this huge amount of demand in terms of companies that need capital and innovation and invention going on in dental.

It’s a very robust deal funnel. It’s coming from organically search and people finding and recognizing our name. It’s coming from industry events. It’s coming from our really large team or corporate partnerships that are referring them in. They come from all different unique sources, but they’re organically coming to us. Generally speaking, we do not pay for marketing or outbound sourcing of these companies.

There’s the question of how do we choose what to invest in with the demand way outpacing the supply of capital, timing and bandwidth in general in this space. How is it that we decide? We’ve invested in 46 companies over the past two funds, but that’s far less than 1% of the companies that we see. We look for many different things. We need to understand what the fit is within our fund? Meaning, in our portfolio success resources, in our portfolio synergies and partnerships, how can we help that company. We want to be a part of something we can help as a strategic minority investor.

What is its return to our fund, ultimately speaking? If we reach a successful endpoint here, what is that going to mean for our investors? We serve them here as fund managers and general partners. How, in general, is the team constructed? Do people’s backgrounds mesh well with what they’re trying to do when things get difficult? Is this the team we can rely on to navigate through that difficult situation? What’s the product and product market fit like. Are we chasing a problem to and trying to create a solution or is there truly a well-validated existing problem and this is a well-fitting solution? These are just some of the criteria that we use, but some of the most common and important.

I think when a lot of people hear private equity, they’re like, “Bad, private equity. Get out of here,” because we associate that with a lot of buying up practices and consulting practices, like what you talked about earlier. You guys are not buying practices, correct?

We don’t invest in any dental practices. We only invest in dental technology,

I know you mentioned that before. I just wanted to make sure we reiterate that, just so no one’s checking out like, “Here’s the private equity guy.” You’re partnering with these dental tech companies to offer services B2B, so a lot of them are supporting the actual practice owner dental practices to be more efficient, provide better care, provide it more efficiently. Hopefully more profitably for the practices. Investing in that tech that’s there to support the doctors, correct?

Yeah, that’s right. Maybe there’s additional importance here behind the portfolio success strategy that we take as opposed to what you may see as private equity with dental practices and owning a majority of it and driving new metrics and driving new culture or cultural changes, and basically taking over the organization. That is not what we do from an investment strategy standpoint. We are a strategic minority investor, so we typically own less than 25% of the company.

We may have a board seat. We typically invest requiring a board seat so that we have eyes on and ears in the war room, knowing what’s going on with the company, being able to help steer it. We’re influencing. We’re not controlling. This is not an authoritative approach. It’s an influential approach with these companies. We’re helping them fundraise, we’re helping them get access to vendors they wouldn’t get access to in the dental space that they need to grow.

We’re helping them gain channel partnership, manufacturers, distributors, insurers, DSOs and so on. We’re helping position them for exit and gain the discipline that they need to be in a position to exit well. We are helping these companies to grow and exit and we’re doing it, again, through minority ownership and through heavy influence rather than through an authoritative or controlling standpoint.

One of my questions was how involved are you in the operations and when do you get involved like, “Guys, this isn’t going the way we wanted it to go.” How much say and how much advisory do you guys offer to those businesses that you partner with?

At the end of the day, it’s a relationship-driven approach. We’ll often even say in some of our marketing materials, “We don’t make deals. We build relationships.” I stand true by that. The Revere brand stands for that. We want to get to know the founder or co-founders. We want to get to know the management team. We want to get to know the board. We want to be able to work with people here. These are complex problems that these companies are trying to solve. In order to navigate complex problems, otherwise, everybody else would be doing it, we have to be able to work with super smart people and be able to work in a very strategic way.

We get involved at the most risky stage stages of the company. When they need to fundraise, when they need to go through regulatory, when they need to scale or exit. We’re heavily involved with them, but that’s an involvement. That’s not being again, authoritatively drilled into them. Those companies are wanting to rely on Revere as a resource to help them.

They know that they can come to us at any time. They can tell us anything good or bad. They know that we’re going to step up and be able to provide them with the access or the introductions or the support that they need. As a father of three kids, I feel a little bit like a parent in what I’m saying here. To put it in another way, we’re a shoulder to cry on, and we’re also happy to be at the bar and party with you when things go really well. That’s really what it is. It’s working with people. It’s about a lot more than the analysts drilling into income statements, balance sheet state statements of cashflow and predicting and financial modeling. It’s only good to an extent. You have to be able to work with the people.

Average Time Frame Of An Investment Relationship

What’s the timeframe of your average relationship? When you invest in a company, for how long are you like, “Our goal is to be here for this long, and then we’re going to hopefully pass you on to someone who can help you continue to grow?” Is that generally how that works?

Yeah. It’s a really interesting question and a question that really hit us when we first incepted this fund Revere Partners and brand in 2019. We came into this space and there was no data. No reliable central, statistically significant data and we’re data-driven analytical people that show how do these companies perform. That’s actually the very first place we started. Myself and my co-founder built a private database of past transactions. Now we track some 1,600 companies and their ongoing transactions.

We built this internal proprietary database tracking companies on many different structured data fields and how they progress. In reality, the answer is that there’s a complex matrix. Across one access is the types of companies, software, FinTech, biotech, MedTech, across the other access of the stages, seed, Stage C plus, Series plus B.

In each one of those sells, there’s a different number of years of the average return profile and also a multiple range. I want everybody to hear that the answer is not a simple answer. That there is a matrix, and it’s a little bit different per different types of companies. They have different milestones that they need to hit. I don’t love the law of averaging, but to put a number because sometimes as people, we just like a number, our data has shown it takes 4.8 years to reach about a 5.2X.

If you average all that together, those are the numbers. Does that mean that’s where we aim? Not necessarily. Most of the companies in our portfolio right now, on paper, most of those markup events of the 46 companies, 21 have had markup events. Of those 21 companies, most of them sit between a 4X and 10X.

Our highest performers are between a 15X and 19X on paper. Is that where it will even out? Only time will tell. From a gross internal rate of return perspective, currently, we’re at 28.5%. That puts us per Cambridge data, carta data that’s going to put us in the upper quartile of VC performance. These are the benchmarks.

Thanks, Jeremy. That’s one more question. I want to reiterate to make sure we’re clear on that. You said your current IRR or internal rate of return is 28.5%?

Yeah. That’s gross IRR. That is across our first two funds. Our portfolio there, it’s counting the 21 companies that have had an actual markup event. Not all the other companies have necessarily raised another round yet. This is counting the companies that have had an external third party, like another fund, or some other valuation process come in and at a different time period than we invested, assign a new value to this company. Up or down, it accounts for both, but a new value since we invested.

If you’re a doctor reading this and you’re like, “This sounds really interesting,” maybe a way to diversify how I have my money invested. I talk about this all the time, and I’m out speaking, I’ll say, think about the wealthiest person you know. Think of that person and how do they build their wealth. The answer is it’s almost always through business, through investing in businesses or real estate. It’s 1 of those 2 things. That’s how you build wealth in this country. I would say it’s not a mystery. We have the blueprint. Do you want to follow the blueprint? That’s the reality.

Laying The Groundwork For A Fruitful Investment

You guys are opening up an opportunity or a doorway to invest in businesses. A lot of times, these are businesses that I don’t get nearly as many as you do, but we get a couple a month. We’re like, “Look at this. It’s a lot of work doing the due diligence on these companies and whether you pull the trigger or invest.” If you’re reading this and you’re thinking, “This could be a really great way for me to diversify. If you’re talking to like a potential investor, what would you tell them?

Do you tell them, “This is what you can expect as an investor with Revere Partners. This is what that would look like?” Are there distributions? Are there profits? You’re going to get money anytime we recap, which is about every 4.8 years, but not guaranteed. How do you lay that groundwork for someone who’s making a decision of whether they want to invest with you guys?

There are different profiles of investors that, of course, come into the fund, and they’re looking for some different things from numeric monetary value all the way through to different value-add components that come out of joining an organization like Revere. I’ll try to paint the picture around some of those. When you’re talking about your dentist doctor, or you’re talking about an executive in the industry, typically, folks are looking at where they are at, like you’re saying, in their wealth building. They’ll often start after they’ve paid back debt. If you’re a dentist and you’ve gone to dental school and you have debt to pay back, this may take you 5 years, 7 years, 10 years to pay back your debt.

You may be in an associate position, or not yet in an ownership position or not yet had a bite at the apple, so to speak, on some major financial event in your life. You’re just starting to diversify. You’ll see folks put around $100,000 to $250,000 as a first step into alternative assets in general. What I’ll say in that category, when you’re first starting diversifying into alternatives, and I’m not an investment advisor, I can’t give you financial advice here, but just from what we see from the statistics of the behavior of investors at our fund and in this industry, is that folks will invest in what they know. That’s Warren Buffett. That’s just good general investment advice.

One of the conversations I often get into with dentists and others in the space is, as you mentioned, there are real estate investments. There are blue-chip stocks, there’s the healthcare S&P and private and public equities. There are mutual funds and CDs. I’ll get into a few questions with individual docs. “How did you find out about that investment?” “My financial advisor, my accountant, my golf buddy, my dental school classmate told me about it.” I’ll ask him 1, 2, 3 questions about how that investment works mechanically or how it performs. Usually, by question 3, if not by question 2, there’s essentially a lack of understanding as to how that investment actually works.

“I did it because someone told me to. I trusted in them. I trusted in the advice and I did it.” I think diversification’s a good thing. I’m not here to tell you that that’s wrong, and I’m not here to tell you to consolidate into fewer asset classes. Absolutely not. That’s not what I do with my own portfolio, but you should be investing in things that you know because there are more benefits to doing that.

Back to the timeline. First, start out at $100,000 to $250,000, typically of alternative asset investing. They reach another stage in their life. Now they’re an owner. Maybe they’re doing better than they were before, or they’ve gotten promoted. It’s not necessarily a huge lump sum of cash that they’ve seen at this point, this next stage of their career but they are doing significantly better than they were doing financially before.

In this case, they’ll typically go and increase about 100% to 200% of what they’re doing in alternative asset investments. Time to turn it up. They know that they have to be even more diversified. They know they have to put in more dollars and more consistently in order for the investment strategy to really work and so they put in more. They then go another stage.

Right now, by age, they may be coming closer to a point in their career where either they’re looking to pivot or they’re looking to retire, or at the bare minimum, they’re looking to potentially replace or shield against a paycheck with whatever it is they’re going to do next with their time. In order to plan for something like that, you need to be 5 to 7 years before a major change in your life to set up this replacement of your income.

People will then go and ahead and double to triple down on their alternatives at that stage again. This is where they’re saying 5 to 7 years out here, I can see a point where I’m no longer getting this same type of paycheck that I’m getting now. I may be doing other things with my time for whatever work-life balance or just some other area of professional interest I’m going to explore. There may be some risk in that financially because I’m not going to be working the day job the same way that I am, and I need to make sure, because I do have commitments. I have a mortgage, I have a family, I have whatever. I do need to make sure that there is cash coming in. I want to replace that income.

Five to seven years out, they do this double or tripling down again. Last, now they’ve seen a big chunk of cash. They’ve sold a business, or they’ve had some major exit or major financial event. When this is happening, you see people 4X to 10X what they’re investing in alternative assets. They spend three months settling the dust on working with financial advisors and where that capital needs to go in terms of public securities and typical education accounts that you’re planning retirement accounts that you’re planning.

All the traditional of asset classes that they’re planning. They’re saying, “How now am I going to work on generational wealth? What am I going to pass on to other generations in my family? What impact or legacy am I going to leave here in the world? Is it doing good by people? Is it making the world a better place? Is it making a better place for my family? Is it just putting money into things I care a lot about, for whatever reason?” They put down a huge amount into alternative assets at that point.

There’s different thinking at different stages of the career or stages of life as investors go through the process. It’s super interesting to talk to investors at each of those stages and understand, but the takeaway point is these are folks who are putting money in alternative assets throughout their career. They’re learning more about them, they’re contributing more to them, and they’re investing in things that they know. They don’t just one and done it. They don’t ignore it as an asset class. They’re doing it bit by increasing it and doing it consistently.

I love that. We talk about something called the wealth journey. I’ve never talked about that before. You literally just walked through the wealth journey, which is you have to have a profitable practice, you keep more than what you spend, so you have your practice generating revenue, generating profit. You take the profits, you invest the profits at other things, those profits grow. Literally, what you just said is we talk about it all the time, the wealth journey. I love that you talked about like that.

How Practices Grow By Consuming Technology

The thing you wrap around it, the icing on the cake is in this particular investment class, if the practice is the thing that you built, you’re investing in yourself, building your practices in main asset, these are things that also pay back to your practice. Practices grow efficiently as they consume technology. Operational workflows at the front practice.

What a cool opportunity to be like, “We’re using this. By the way, I am also an investor in this.” That’s pretty cool to be able to say that.

Long since are the days when you saw cool technology, you were an early adopter to it, you were giving feedback to the company, whether you know it or not, you were buying more of it because you like using it on your patients or in your practice you are recommending it to others because you like it so much, you negotiated with the company a nice discount, you got a 20% discount per practice per month. Some years later, in the headlines in the industry, you read XYZ corporate bought that company. Now you’re sitting there thinking, “Can I even use the technology now? I may or may not even work with that corporate’s platform.”

“Why wasn’t I a part of the upside of that? I negotiated just for a discount per practice per month. I was obsessed with the walls and roof and patient roster that my practice is an asset, and I forgot all of the other stuff as an asset class that went through my practice.” I just let it go through. It was just a pass through. You have to really stop and think, do you want that stuff to just be a pass through for you or do you want to take an active role in steering those technologies and being able to be successful or benefit off of it?

How The Due Diligence Process Looks Like

Benefit from the upside. I think, too, it shouldn’t be understated the amount of time just doing due diligence. One of these companies is massive. What does that due diligence process look like for you guys when you’re looking at investing in a company?

The investment team and the portfolio success team is really the most robust part of Revere. When we’re vetting a company, they first go through a screening process. They have to submit things like an online application, an investment deck, pro forma financial models. They’re screened to see if they fit right by an analyst team, a specific analyst team that does the screening.

If they pass, they then go on to this primary diligence phase. They get a primary diligence checklist of lots of different documents they have to deliver to us. Plus, we use our internal data and benchmarks. They also get split into a dual track on our team where we have an industry team, a venture partner, and advisors from the industry who are experts in that field. Clinical, financial, technical, operational, as well as our analyst team doing primary diligence.

That’s about a 30-page written report. Those two teams have to agree that the technology is still interesting as an investment. It passes to secondary diligence. Now we have a bigger checklist of things that we need from the company. We’re also looking at external data and benchmarking. Now we’re at about a 60 to 100-page report being written on the company. If the two teams still agree, talking to the founders about the people doing demos of the technology, really looking into how the technology works and so much more about the company, then it goes on to our investment committee.

That’s about two dozen people of different perspectives who review the company in comparison to other potential investments and vote. If it then passes, we then do last financial and legal checks. There’s a proprietary negotiated set of terms that apply to venture capital funds and specifically to revere strategic value.

You’re talking about a 26-point diligence process that the companies that make it all the way through end-to-end in order to get an investment and enter the portfolio success resources that we have available. I’ll answer a bit of a broader question here, which we sometimes get. Why shouldn’t I invest directly into these technology companies versus invest in a fund? I’m included. I’m a dentist.

There’s this tension between control and risk that’s there. It’s about the riskiest thing you can do to invest directly in a company and put all your chips in it. I’ll tell you why in a minute. However, you have more control. If you’re trying to go to sleep at night and you’re comfortable with, “I made a great decision, take all the credit for that,” or, “I made an awful decision and that’s all on me,” that’s the most controlled state you can be in.

From an investment perspective, again, that’s the riskiest thing you can do. It works something like this. The first thing you have to do is comparison shop. You might think diagnostics on radiographs, artificial intelligence diagnostic support is a great category. There are 38 companies that we track globally that are in that space that do a very overlapped set of things.

They do it a little differently and they do it with different approvals, etc., but you have to comparison shop just like you do on Amazon as a consumer when you’re buying any product. You’ve got to be a really good comparison shopper to know you’ve picked the best one. You’ve got to run diligence. Just the process that I explained right there.

You’re an individual. I don’t doubt any of our colleagues, they’re all very smart people, highly analytical, but you got to be able to run a real diligence process to know what’s going on underneath the hood of a company and be able to predict success of that company. You’ve got to invest. Venture capitalists, by definition, tend to get better terms than the individual investor. We’re institutional. We provide a whole lot of support to the company. It’s really tough. No matter how much money you walk into the company with, it’s really tough to get the terms that a VC gets unless that company’s absolutely desperate. Now you’re in a whole other set of challenges.

You then got to support the company. I don’t just mean using it and recommending it to your buddies, giving it some clinical feedback. You’ve got to really be able to find this company through regulatory support, through fundraising support, through to scale it with corporates through channel partnerships to set it up for exit. I’m going to do that as an individual running another business.

Last but not least, to manage a set of investments like this, you got to deal with the legal, you have to deal with the taxes, you have to deal with the compliance. That’s a lot of stuff, folks. Hiring an attorney, hiring the accountant, getting people with experience in these venture-style deals. It shouldn’t be taken for granted.

Not to mention the cost. Securities attorneys are some of the most expensive attorneys you can hire.

All this stuff is centrally managed, baked into the fees and to the investment platform. You are literally handed a K1 package that you can just pass on to your accountant and they should know what to do with it. Any distributions that come through, they literally come through on our digital platform and on the very same platform, if you want to know how any of these companies are doing, they’re required to report quarterly and you can dig through it. If you don’t want to dig through it, we’ll send you a newsletter that summarizes it and we’ll have you on a quarterly investor call that is with other investors that shows you and tells you how they’re doing. Doing all of that as an individual is a very tough thing statistically to do individually.

Understanding Revere Partners’ Three Funds

Just even listening to you go through it and being familiar with pieces of that, I know how overwhelming and cumbersome it can be. Jeremy, one of the questions I had, so you have three funds. You’ve got Fund 1, Fund 2, and those are closed, is my understanding.

Fund 1 is fully raised, fully deployed, it’s closed. Fund 2, we leave evergreen. We’ve deployed most of it, but we leave the end portion of it. We call it our insiders fund or doctor’s fund. It’s a place where we have flexible minimums and flexible call schedules. We stay really consistent and really involved with doctors, dentists who are just starting that part of the investment and wealth-building life cycle where they’re looking to put down check sizes of $100,000 or up to $250,000 roughly. Those are not hard numbers. Neither of them are hard numbers. They’re looking to just dip their toe in and get started. It’s easier to do it in that a fund structure.

The third fund is a larger institutional fund. It’s $100 million target fund that we are raising actively right now. It’s a larger minimum check size, $250,000 minimum. It’s a closed-ended traditional fund structure. If you’re an investor in that fund, no matter what size. $250,000 or above, you get exposure to all the deals that we invest in as opposed to the doctor’s fund. You’re invested in the deals that are invested in out of the time period that you’re investing.

That’s important to know because someone could see on your website you’re investing in XYZ company and want to get involved in that company, it may not be a possibility because either it was in Fund 1 and that that fund’s closed or Fund 2. I think it’s important for people to know, the reason why funds do this, and Jeremy, correct me if I’m wrong, I hate using the word fair, but I don’t know what else to say, but it’s not fair for the early bird investors who get in and put a little more risk at play to then have someone else come in a year or two later and go, “This is already proven. I want to be a part of that too.”

There’s got to be that reward for the risk of the people that were in the fund earlier. We talked through and talk around these things, like you’d want the same thing if you were early in the fund too. It’s like, “You still have an opportunity to be a part of these, but it’s just going to be different than those who are part of this 3, 4, 5 years ago.”

There’s a risk-reward profile here. The biggest payoff to early investors is that they were in our fund early. Our fund got into great technology early, and now that technology is a large multiple because they were in a lower valuation. That’s the biggest payoff. We do have what we call a pay-it-forward model, meaning we do reinvest. There are 21 companies that have had markup events. We’ve made 22 reinvestments. They’re not all one-to-one the same.

We’ve made a lot of reinvestments. We always hold back some capital in a fund to make reinvestments in the winners. Future investors do benefit from the work that the fund and its previous investors have built or earned. We typically earn a set of terms with a fund when we come in the first with a technology when we come in the first time.

It may have pay-it-forward terms that pertain to the next round of fundraising that future investors can benefit from. It’s also an incentive for previous investors to continue investing with us. There are some of these pay-it-forward terms that as you continue to build a brand and continue to build successive funds and reinvest in winners, you do have some of these benefits of reinvesting in winner portfolio companies. We also make a lot of new and exciting investments that you may not want to miss out on either. It’s just a way to benefit from being a part of a great organization, but also diversify risk.

For those people who are reading who this is maybe new, it is different than I’m going to go buy some stocks or some mutual funds on XYZ stock trading platform. I talk a lot about my grandfather who was an orthodontist, very successful, but did the opposite of what you and Warren Buffett have said, invested in things he didn’t know anything about.

One of the stories I tell is he was one of the largest privately held dairy farms that was in Southern Utah, and ended up going bankrupt because he’s an orthodontist, not a dairy farmer. He didn’t know how to run a dairy farm. I think there’s a lot to be said about investing in what sticking with what you know. There’s a lot of comfort even again, and I like you, I like to invest in these alternatives, but when it gets outside of the scope of what I’m comfortable for, I get really uncomfortable.

Exciting Tech Innovations To Look Out For

I don’t really know anything about retail or any merchandising or inventory all these things that I’m not really familiar with and you start to get. I think that’s a really good point. Jeremy, I’m sensitive and want to keep. I know you’ve got a busy schedule. Let’s wrap it up. What are some tech that you’re super excited about that you and maybe some companies that are really on your radar, as dentistry seems to be going through this evolution of AI and all this new tech, what are you excited about? What should people be looking for and how do, what would you talk, what would you tell our audience?

This is really the coolest part of my job, the part that I love the most. Some people, if you’re not calling us a venture capital fund, some call us the dental tech geek squad. We obsess over technology. Personally, I’m a tinkerer, I’m an early adopter, I’m a builder. It relates to the things I love and what I love to do, so this is really the most exciting. I have learned, as a parent of children, same thing with the fund manager of a portfolio, I want to be very clear to disclose this is no picking of favorites but just rather featuring some new and exciting categories. I’ll mention a few concrete examples just to make them clear here.

We have so many great companies in the portfolio. One of these areas is really around imaging and robotics. I think that is one that continues to surface itself in today’s world for several different reasons. Imaging nowadays has been pretty fixed. You have intraoral scans, you have radiographs, you have CBCT, and that’s about it. It’s been that way for a while.

We’re starting to see a new form of imaging called optical coherence tomography. It’s using structured light to see into structures soft and hard structures in your mouth, 2, 3 millimeters in, very accurately. It’s used in many other healthcare sub-sectors. You can do an optical coherence tomography scan on your closed eyelid to look at your retina. These are not brand-new technologies. They’re just newly applied to dentistry, but the company perspective that’s Boston-based has this intraoral scanning capacity that can not only map the external anatomy of your teeth, but can actually see inside of them in a full 3D reconstructive stack.

That is super exciting. It goes very quickly in the same form factor as an intraoral scanner, a wand in your hand, in the patient’s mouth, very quickly, moving from tooth to tooth and able to see in it. That is transformative. There’s no ionizing radiation inside and outside the tooth. You can do so much with that from a preventative or diagnostic standpoint all the way to a restorative standpoint.

Those guys also happen to have built a robot that in ten minutes or less can prep your tooth for a crown down to microns of accuracy. You can deliver a same-day final restoration chairside. It’s a different world. It’s also a different world because, again, 350 million aging Americans in this country, 200,000 dentists. They’re not evenly dispersed throughout the country.

Jeremy, on something like that, though, on the robotics, is that like FDA approved? Could you put that in your practice and start treating patients right now with that? That seems to be the lag. I remember even we’d sit through like AI forums even a year or two years ago, and they’re like, “The technology’s there, but the laws are lagging so far behind that. The technology’s there, but we can’t actually implement it.” How is that with that?

The scanner has two different technologies. The scanner and the robot. The scanner is expected to hit the market in late 2026 with full regulatory approval at that point. The robot’s going to be a little bit behind that. It’s going to take until ‘27, ‘28 or so in order to get full regulatory approval. It is currently being tested and used. It’s been tested on mannequins and humans.

I’ll tell you, I sat there and did it myself on a naturally mounted tooth in a mannequin, that thing is dead accurate. It’s very solid technology. It’s transformative. It’s a breakthrough technology in terms of how we deliver care, because a lot of people who need care that the number of hands we have cannot possibly deliver.

That’s one of them that’s interesting. Constantly hearing AI. We can’t really have this conversation without mentioning AI, but we look very carefully for areas where there is a moat, a protectable, proprietary application where they’re solving a problem that the team inherently and deeply knows and understands. The biggest fear factor there is there are a lot of technologies that come out and who says ChatGPT or Gemini can’t just do it? You have to be really careful or you get washed out.

For example, a company like PureLogic where they have millions of minutes and conversational intelligence between the front office staff and the patient, and they’ve optimized what that conversation and metrics and conversion rate optimization looks like, and they dashboard it for the practice. They track all the progress back to bookings, to people who show up to dollars produced, and they show the practice, not just tell them. Very niche-focused application of AI that is doing exactly the right thing in a complex, very specific problem. That’s a very exciting technology. That’s one of them.

We see specialty enablement is broad. I’ll give you a few examples in that company. Two Front is partnering with a line and with orthodontists to help enable general dentists to do more complex care while the orthodontist builds their virtual practice, and everybody gets paid off. Eighty percent of people need teeth straightened. There are not enough hands in the orthodontic community to do that. Even with general dentists doing it, we do not have enough hands, but this at least builds bridges the gap between the general practitioner and the and the orthodontist in a way that is satisfactory to all the professionals involved.

That’s a hugely promotive one you have the company. Odne in the endo space, they’ve produced a new end-to-end system to clean and to fill root canal. General dentists being able to do more complex endo. An endodontist can use it too. Using this cavitation process, the force of bursting bubbles to minimally invasively clean out canals, and then you’re using a hydrogel to fill it instead of gutta-percha.

It’s getting more accessory canals. It’s taking away less natural structure. It’s overall solving a lot of problems at a public health level. Last but not least, the implant space or regenerative technology, RevBio, also Boston-based. Think of them as a super glue for dental. Seventy percent of our portfolio and other sub-healthcare verticals. This one comes from the orthopedic space. First applications for use are in cranial flap, second is in spinal compression, third is in implant stabilization.

Think about same-day delivery of implants. You’re taking out teeth. You need to put an implant in. Patient doesn’t want a nine-month-long multiple-visit procedure going on. In this case, you’d be able to take the tooth out, put the implant in and stabilize it using RevBio’s product tetranite, which is bone regenerative scaffold that you can use even in the presence of moisture to stabilize that implant and osteo-integrate into that implant. Looking at technologies across the board here from software solutions to AI solutions to regenerative solutions and medical devices that are changing the way that dentistry is practiced now.

Get In Touch With Dr. Krell

I could sit here for hours and probably listen to more and more of those. That’s so cool. The fact that you guys are on the front forefront of all of that is interesting. Jeremy, if people want to know more about you and what you guys are doing and Revere partners, what’s the best way to get in touch or look you up or find out more about what you guys are doing over there?

Certainly, our website has a lot of information, ReverePartnersVC.com. Anybody is always welcome to reach out to me directly at Jeremy@ReverePartnersVC.com.

Jeremy, thank you so much for being on here. This has been so interesting to just see. It’s moving very quickly, and I think those people that have been in the industry for a long time are definitely feeling that. It’s important to not just bury our heads. You have an opportunity, which again, I love what you said earlier, where you have actually have an opportunity. Everyone reading has an opportunity to be a part of these companies, a part of this technology to invest in and actually and participate in as these companies grow and provide these amazing resources.

I love what you said as far as just not enough hands to deliver the amount of care that’s needed out there. The only way you’re going to leverage that is through technology innovation and being one of those docs in the forefront is willing to integrate that technology and innovation into your practice or practices. I think everything you’ve shared with us here is awesome. I really appreciate your time, your expertise and your willingness to come in here and share with us.

Jonathan, I appreciate you. I appreciate Austin. I appreciate your entire team and you guys are creating a platform for and sharing exceptional content and education with people and I always appreciate the opportunity to have a conversation with you.

Jeremy, thanks so much. I look forward to the next time we get to do this. Please look up Revere Partners and Jeremy. Get in touch with Jeremy and his group as well. Jeremy, thanks again for being here. I really appreciate it.

Thank you.

Important Links

• Dr. Jeremy Krell on LinkedIn
• Revere Partners
• Dr. Jeremy Krell Email
• Jonathan Moffat
• Jonathan Moffat on LinkedIn
• Aligned Advisors

About Dr. Jeremy Krell

Dr. Jeremy Krell is a general dentist, startup operator, and Investor. Managing Partner of Revere Partners, he built Barchester Bay Group, overseeing 40+ ventures, and contributed to the success of Oscar Health, which had an IPO, and quip (VC-backed unicorn). Jeremy also serves in several Board and leadership capacities, including Chairman of HPU WSDM. He is actively shaping the future of dentistry.