Dental practices have changed dramatically over the last decade.
The technology supporting them hasn’t always kept pace.
Today’s dental teams are navigating growing administrative demands, staffing challenges, rising patient expectations, increasingly complex revenue cycles, and a rapidly expanding number of technologies promising to make it all easier.
Too often, “easier” has meant adding another system.
Another login. Another integration. Another vendor. Another place for information to live.
We believe the next era of dental technology should look very different.
That’s why Curve Dental is making a $200 million commitment to research and development focused on advancing Curve Hero and the ecosystem of capabilities surrounding it.
But the number itself is only part of the story.
The dental industry is in the middle of a major technology transition.
According to Curve Chairman and CEO Dave Cormack, approximately 85% of the roughly 160,000 dental practices in North America still operate on legacy client-server systems. As more practices move to the cloud, the question is becoming less about whether to move and more about what kind of cloud platform they're moving to.
A collection of products doesn't necessarily create a connected platform.
When core practice management, patient communication, payments, insurance, analytics, clinical workflows, and other functions live across separate systems, dental teams can still find themselves navigating fragmented data and disconnected workflows—even if each individual tool is cloud-based.
We see a different path forward: bringing more of the dental practice together within one intelligent, connected environment.
Over the past eight years, Curve has already invested $100 million in research and development. That investment has helped expand Curve from core practice management into a broader platform spanning areas including patient engagement, insurance eligibility, payments, revenue cycle management, business intelligence, membership plans, AI-powered workflows, and more.
The next $200 million represents a commitment to continue that work.
The goal isn't to add technology for technology's sake.
It's to remove friction from the day-to-day work of running a dental practice.
That means creating workflows where information moves with the team. Where clinical and business operations are more closely connected. Where AI can help reduce repetitive work instead of creating another application to manage. And where practices can add capabilities as they grow without having to rebuild their technology stack around them.
Artificial intelligence will be a major part of this next chapter, but we don't believe dental teams should have to constantly think about whether they're “using AI.”
The most useful AI will simply make familiar workflows faster and easier.
We're already seeing that philosophy take shape across Curve as AI becomes embedded into clinical and administrative workflows.
The opportunity ahead is much bigger: using intelligence across a connected platform to help teams spend less time navigating software and more time doing the work that requires a human.
Caring for patients. Leading teams. Making decisions. Growing their practices.
Technology decisions in dentistry aren't made for a single moment in time.
A solo practice today may become a multi-location group tomorrow. A growing organization may add new providers, services, workflows, or revenue streams.
The software underneath that growth has to evolve with it.
Curve's long-term vision is to build a platform capable of supporting practices across those stages—from single-location practices to growing groups and DSOs—without forcing them to piece together an increasingly complicated technology stack as their needs change.
And because roughly 60% of the features we've introduced over the last several years have come directly from customer feedback, that evolution will continue to be shaped by the people using Curve every day.
Dentistry doesn't need more technology simply for the sake of having more technology.
It needs technology that gives teams something back.
Fewer manual tasks. Fewer disconnected systems. Less time spent managing software. More visibility across the practice. And ultimately, more time and capacity to focus on patients and growth.
That's what this next investment is about.
We're building toward a future where the technology behind a dental practice feels less like a collection of tools—and more like one connected system working alongside the people who use it.
And we're just getting started.