Two years ago, the story in dental AI was the money: who was raising the biggest round to teach a computer to read a bitewing. That race is essentially over, and the war chests are set. In 2026 the contest has moved somewhere more consequential: a land grab for DSO contracts, and a scramble to prove that dentists will actually keep using the software once the novelty wears off.

The war chests

Three companies took the category’s biggest checks, and all three are still standing. Pearl raised a $58 million Series B in mid-2024, led by Left Lane Capital and billed as the largest investment in dental AI history. Overjet answered with a $53.2 million Series C led by March Capital, pushing its total funding to roughly $133 million at a valuation near $550 million. And in January 2025, VideaHealth, since rebranded simply Videa, closed a $40 million oversubscribed Series B led by Threshold Ventures. Notably, the American Dental Association itself invested in both Pearl and Overjet.

All three sell variations of the same core product: FDA-cleared software that reads a radiograph and flags caries, bone loss, and other findings more consistently than a tired human eye at the end of a long day. But in 2026, that capability is table stakes.

The real story: the DSO land grab

Funding rounds don’t change dentistry; deployment does. And this year the big three have been racing to wire themselves into the corporate groups that now employ a growing share of dentists. The 2026 scoreboard is crowded. Pearl landed enterprise deals with Smile Brands, rolling out to 600 locations, along with PDS Health, DECA Dental, and Tampa’s Coast Dental. Overjet added Sonrava Health’s 450-plus practices and deepened its partnership with Dental Care Alliance. And Videa pulled off perhaps the single largest integration of the year: Aspen Dental rolled its Clinical Assist platform across more than 1,100 practices in six weeks.

If you are a new dentist wondering whether you will encounter this software, the answer is that you almost certainly will.

Beyond the bitewing

The other shift is scope. Detecting decay was the wedge; the platforms are now expanding into the parts of a practice where the real money and friction live. Pearl launched Pearl RCM for cleaner insurance claims and Pearl Voice for clinical documentation, and embedded its detection engine directly into Henry Schein One's Dentrix Ascend platform. Videa debuted an ambient, conversational AI and an automated insurance verification tool. Overjet, the most insurance focused of the three with payers already using its AI to adjudicate claims, earned a first of its kind FDA clearance to enhance images. This clearance allows for sharpening blurry or noisy X-rays without discarding clinical detail.

These are no longer “cavity detectors.” They are trying to become the operating layer of the practice. Which also means the same AI a dentist uses to spot a lesion may be the AI a payer uses to deny the treatment. Worth watching.

Pearl even turned its sheer scale into a headline. In June 2026 it published the Pearl Oral Health Index, a “radiographic census” built from 26 million X-rays across 15 million patients, and reported that untreated decay in its dataset ran roughly 4.5 times higher than federal survey data suggests. Whatever you make of the methodology, it is a preview of what population scale diagnostic AI can claim to see that traditional public health surveys cannot.

The field is getting more crowded

The big three no longer have the category to themselves. In July 2026, Velmeni earned FDA clearance for AI-powered 3D CBCT imaging, a signal that the frontier is moving from 2D radiographs toward 3D.

The reality check that hasn’t gone away

Here is the number that should temper every funding headline: about 30% of dentists say they do not use AI and never plan to, according to a 2026 ADA report. Earlier research found that roughly 40% of dentists who adopt a new AI tool abandon it within 90 days. The capital is committed, the FDA clearances are stacking up, and the DSO contracts are real. But adoption is still the unsolved problem. A tool installed across 600 offices is not the same as a tool actually used in 600 offices on a Tuesday afternoon.