Torch Dental, the digital all-in-one dental supply partner for dental practices, announced its latest funding round of $28M, bringing the total funding since inception to approximately $40M. The Series B investment was led by Health Velocity Capital, with participation from existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, which led previous financing rounds, FJ Labs, Felicis Ventures, Tectonic Ventures, Raga Partners, Town Hall Ventures, among other investors. The 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 the process of keeping track of her dental products and constantly needing to negotiate reasonable prices. 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.
“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,” said Khaled Boukadoum, co-founder and Torch Dental board member.
A New Take on the B2B Marketplace Approach
The company has been at the forefront of B2B marketplace innovation. Unlike consumer marketplaces, B2B marketplaces tend to engage with incumbent supply chains, which can have advantages but also adds the complexity of aligning the goals of existing stakeholders. Practices currently use a mix of 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.
“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,” said Kent Bennett, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners and Torch Dental board member.
Torch has taken a hyper customer-centric approach with the goal of empowering 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 spending 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 their mission of transitioning the space from analog to digital.
“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,” said Saurabh Bhansali, partner at Health Velocity Capital and Torch Dental board member.
Torch is now partnered with over 2,000 dental practices and supported by industry experts and entrepreneurs such as 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 CFO of Yelp), among others.
Torch is the digital all-in-one supply partner for dental practices. Torch has partnered with over 2,000 dental practices across the US and continues to grow quickly. The team has professional experience from Blackstone, SmartAsset, Datadog, Dropbox, and personal ties to the dental industry through family and previous investing and operating experience. The company is backed by leading investors such as Bessemer Venture Partners, Health Velocity Capital, FJ Labs, Felicis Ventures, Tectonic Ventures, Raga Partners, Town Hall Ventures, among other investors. Torch is building a world-class, close-knit team that is energized by solving real-world problems.
About Bessemer Venture Partners
Bessemer Venture Partners helps entrepreneurs lay strong foundations to build and forge long-standing companies. With more than 145 IPOs and 300 portfolio companies in the enterprise, consumer, and healthcare spaces, Bessemer supports founders and CEOs from their early days through every stage of growth. Bessemer’s global portfolio has included Pinterest, Shopify, Twilio, Yelp, LinkedIn, PagerDuty, DocuSign, Wix, Fiverr, and Toast and has $20 billion of assets under management. Bessemer has teams of investors and partners located in Tel Aviv, Silicon Valley, San Francisco, New York, London, Hong Kong, Boston, and Bangalore.
About Health Velocity Capital
Health Velocity Capital invests exclusively in innovative healthcare software and services companies. The firm’s partners have more than 90 collective years as investors, entrepreneurs, and executives helping to finance and build innovative companies that created important new healthcare markets and became market leaders, including successful companies such as Teladoc, Livongo Health, Change Healthcare, MDLive, Contessa Health, Headspace Health, Aspire Health, Zipari, IVX Health, Artera (formerly known as Well Health), Compassus, Aperio, The Advisory Board Company, Healthways (Tivity Health), US Renal Care, Spero Health, OnShift, and many others.
