Medical devices & diagnostics · Dental robotics
Perceptive Technologies
A handheld scanner that sees inside a tooth with infrared light instead of X-rays, and a robot arm that cuts the tooth. Perceptive ran the first fully automated dental preparation on a human in 2024, in Colombia. Neither product is FDA cleared or for sale in the United States.
Nobody was holding the drill
On July 30, 2024, Perceptive announced that a robot had prepared a human tooth for a crown with no person guiding the cutting instrument. The patient was awake. The procedure happened in Barranquilla, Colombia, as STAT reported the same day. The company put out video of a mechanical arm grinding down the side of a tooth.
“We’re excited to successfully complete the world’s first fully automated robotic dental procedure,” said Chris Ciriello, the dentist who founded the company.
The cutting makes the video. The harder engineering sits one step earlier. A robot cannot cut a tooth it cannot see, and a dental X-ray is a flat picture of a solid object. So Perceptive built the camera first: a handheld scanner using optical coherence tomography, an infrared technique long used in ophthalmology, to capture volume data through gum tissue, through fluid, and under the enamel surface. Feed that volume to a model and the software can find the decay, design the restoration, and hand the robot a cutting path.
Two visits, two hours, and a queue
A crown is a two appointment job: about two hours, split between a preparation visit and a later cementation visit, because the replacement part cannot be made until the tooth has been cut and measured.
Perceptive inverts that order. If the scanner models the inside of the tooth well enough, the restoration can be milled before the drill starts and the two visits collapse into one. The company targets 15 minutes. Its own website footnote is careful about where that number comes from: the timing appears achievable based on pre-clinical in-house testing and has not been verified in patients in the United States under an approved protocol.
The demand-side argument is access. A profession that cannot train dentists fast enough has to get more out of the ones it has.
The dentist who ran out of hours
Ciriello was born in Canada and finished dental school at Western University in 2008. He practiced in rural areas where, by the company’s telling, there were not enough dentists to treat everyone who needed treating. He built a dental support organization to add capacity, and scaling it he hit the same wall again.
The bet that followed, imaging plus AI plus robotics, is an unusual one for a practicing dentist to make, and the company leans on academic partners for credibility: the Harvard School of Dental Medicine and the American Dental Association’s Forsyth Institute. German Gallucci, chair of restorative dentistry at Harvard, appears in company releases. Wei Kang is principal investigator on the federal grant.
Cyberdontics, then Perceptive
The company went through Y Combinator in the Winter 2020 batch under the name Cyberdontics. In 2021 it won the pitch prize at the Forsyth Institute’s dentech conference, and Ciriello told Forsyth the following year what that was worth: “Winning this award helps us close our Series A round of financing. We are still in stealth R&D mode.”
The Series A closed in October 2022 at $15 million, led by the dental chain Pacific Dental Services, now PDS Health. Global Venturing called it the chain’s first venture investment and a rare case of a dental corporate backing a dental startup. TechCrunch ran it under a headline about robotic root canals; Popular Science later corrected the scope, noting that “It is intended for fillings and dental crowns, not root canals.”
In September 2023 the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research began funding the scanner through an SBIR Phase II award. By July 2024 the company had renamed itself Perceptive, come out of stealth, and reported $30 million raised to date from PDS Health, the dentist Ed Zuckerberg, Innospark Ventures, KdT Ventures, Primavera Capital, Plaisance Capital and Y Combinator. In October 2024 it reported a feasibility study of the scanner inside PDS Health practices; in January 2025 the Dental Innovation Alliance invested; in July 2025 an observational scanner study was registered at ADA Forsyth.
What is proven, and what is still claimed
| Evidence | What the record shows | Source type |
|---|---|---|
| FDA clearance | None. No 510(k) and no PMA for Perceptive Technologies or Cyberdontics as of Sep 22, 2026. The three FDA records matching the word Perceptive belong to other firms: two Perceptive Systems devices from 1986 and 1995, and NilRead from Perceptive Software in 2015. | Public record |
| First in human robotic preparation | Announced Jul 30, 2024. A crown preparation performed outside the United States, in Barranquilla, Colombia. No clinical data published. The release states that statements about the products “have not been reviewed by FDA or other regulatory agency.” | Company-stated |
| Regulatory status, in the company’s words | The website says the robot has had in-house testing, outside-US dry runs on awake moving patients, and “a first in-human OUS automated restoration procedure,” but no US testing under IRB approval or an FDA-approved IDE, and that it is “not currently available for sale in the U.S.” | Company-stated |
| Federal grant | NIH NIDCR SBIR Phase II R44DE033316 for the OCT scanner: $872,998 in FY2023 and $838,114 in FY2024, total $1,711,112. The project period ended Aug 31, 2026, with no FY2025 or FY2026 increment on record. The abstract still calls the applicant Cyberdontics. | Public record |
| Registered study | NCT07092592, observational, 70 participants estimated, sponsored by the company with NIDCR and The Forsyth Institute, at ADA Forsyth. Posted Jul 30, 2025; estimated start Aug 7, 2025; estimated completion Dec 2025. Still reads not yet recruiting, unchanged since posting. | Public record |
| Scanner feasibility study | Announced Oct 15, 2024 with PDS Health as an early feasibility study of an in-vivo 3D intraoral OCT system. Participant count, protocol and endpoints undisclosed; no results published. | Company-stated |
| The 90 percent caries figure | Marketed as over 90 percent sensitivity to caries against roughly 45 percent for 2D X-rays. The company footnote sources it to OCT literature generally, citing a 2020 study reporting 87 percent sensitivity for enamel caries and 85 percent for dentin caries, not to a trial of this scanner. | Claim wider than cited evidence |
| Cutting precision | TechCrunch reported in 2022 that the system would cut “down to around 30 microns.” The current website says “our prototypes can cut to 100 microns.” | Differs from earlier reporting |
| Peer-reviewed papers | None found for the company or the device as of Sep 22, 2026. The 15 PubMed records returned by a name search all belong to unrelated groups. | Not found |
Read plainly: the imaging half has a federal grant, an academic site and a registered protocol behind it, more scaffolding than most device startups carry this early. The robotics half has one demonstration, performed abroad, with no published data and no US regulatory pathway opened. The distance between the halves is the story. And the registered study, the one thing that would move the scanner from claim to record, has sat unstarted for a year past its own completion date.
What to watch
- Whether NCT07092592 ever starts. Its estimated completion date passed in December 2025.
- A first FDA submission. In July 2024 Ciriello told STAT the company was about five years from submitting; in 2025 he said the imaging product would launch in 12 to 18 months.
- Published data from the PDS Health feasibility study, so far only a press release.
- Any funding figure later than the $30 million reported in July 2024, which a September 2025 profile was still using.
- A successor to R44DE033316, whose project period ended August 31, 2026.
In their words
“the idea that you can literally have this robot in your mouth for under one minute and you can be out the door 15 minutes later, is a game changer”
Chris Ciriello, founder and CEO, to TechCrunch, 2022 · Interview
“Winning this award helps us close our Series A round of financing. We are still in stealth R&D mode.”
Chris Ciriello, Q&A with the Forsyth Institute, 2022 · Interview
“There is no universe in which dentistry will ever work without the dentist.”
Chris Ciriello, Incisal Edge interview by Jerry Markon, 2025 · Interview
“We’ve seen huge demand for what we’re making. A lot of people are investing in our company. A huge number of dentists have signed letters of intent.”
Chris Ciriello, Incisal Edge, 2025 · Company-stated
“What AI offers is the chance to put that personal connection back at the centre of care.”
Chris Ciriello, Schulich, Western University, Sep 2025 · Independent
“Perceptive’s new intraoral OCT imaging system has the potential to significantly reduce the reliance on X-rays and may improve upon existing intraoral scanning technology”
German Gallucci, Harvard School of Dental Medicine, October 2024 release · Company release
“While it’s still early, the potential for this technology to transform patient care is clear.”
Stephen Thorne IV, founder and CEO, PDS Health, October 2024 release · Partner-stated
Related companies
Sources
- Public recordopenFDA 510(k) and PMA searches
- Public recordNIH RePORTER, 1R44DE033316-01 and 5R44DE033316-02
- Public recordClinicalTrials.gov NCT07092592
- Public recordSEC EDGAR company search
- IndependentDental AI startup raises $30 million, including from Mark Zuckerberg’s dad
- IndependentCyberdontics raises $15M for robotic root canals
- IndependentThe Big Deal: Cyberdontics bites on corporate cash
- IndependentRobot dentist can prep a tooth crown in 15 minutes
- InterviewHe, Robot
- InterviewA Q&A with Dr. Chris Ciriello
- IndependentThe human touch, reimagined with AI
- CompanyPerceptive Completes World’s First Fully Automated Dental Procedure on a Human
- CompanyPerceptive Completes Clinical Study of 3D Intraoral OCT Imaging at PDS Health
- InvestorDIA Backs Perceptive to Launch a New Era of Robotic Dentistry
- CompanyPerceptive website, with regulatory footnotes
Profile researched and written by Healthcare Discovery. Last updated September 29, 2026.
