Orthodontic Industry News: SoftSmile 2023 Year in Review

Looking back on 2023: 

SoftSmile has had a remarkable past 12 months. 

As we approach the end of 2023, over 500 doctors have started working with VISION, and 50,000 patients and counting now have more beautiful smiles with the help of our technology. 

In 2022, around 90% of our customers had just started using VISION in their businesses. In the last six months of 2023, over 30,000 cases have been made using VISION. SoftSmile has increased its case volume by 40x in the past year (our monthly growth rate was 13%), and we anticipate even greater gains in the coming year. 

We are so grateful to our growing group of customers. During this year, we announced key partnerships with multiple aligner brands including Dandy, Candid, ODL, and Dental Axess. Over 30 aligner brands are currently using VISION to grow their market share. 

We have exceeded our expectations for growth and expansion this year. We set out to scale our enterprise clients and expand our global reach. Now we have customers in more than 10 countries. 

 

Our Technology

Our most important promise to our customers is to improve and expand the capabilities of our technology continually. We take user feedback very seriously and as a result, we’ve committed to quarterly releases of new improvements, features, and bug fixes. In the past year, we’ve released more than 130 new features. 

In the first quarter of 2023, we rolled out VISION’s jaw displacement and overcorrection features. We released the VISION WebPortal in Q2. This platform allows doctors to manage their patients' treatment from anywhere in the world, on any device. 

In addition, we released our two treatment review platforms: the VISION WebViewer and Doctor-Facing Application both of which improve communication and efficiency between doctors, technicians, and patients. 

During the third quarter, we completed the integration of CBCT into VISION. In the fourth quarter of this year, we have released our Auto-Setup and matching features. 

Over the past three years, as our team has worked tirelessly to upgrade VISION, preprocessing speed has increased by 30%, and setup times have improved by 40%. Currently, VISION’s processing speeds are: 

• Segmentation: 1 minute
• Setup: under 30 minutes
• Postprocessing: 5 minutes
• CBCT: 5 minutes

SoftSmile’s clients can rest assured that they are always utilizing state-of-the-art technology designed for optimal performance and precision for beautiful patient smiles. 

 

Patents

This year alone, we had 25 US patents granted. We currently have over 70 issued US patents. Our patent profile is one of the largest and most robust in the orthodontic industry, second only to Align Technology. 

For several of these new patents, we have seen the Patent Office issuing patents to us 8 to 10 months from the date of filing, whereas it normally takes 2 to 3 years to have a patent issued. This proves that our unique concepts and improvements are being swiftly recognized by the Patent Office. 

Our technology is strong and advanced, and we continue to find new details to claim and protect within the previous major patents we’ve obtained. 

 

Recognition & the future 

At the beginning of the year, SoftSmile and VISION were recognized for advanced AI innovations and named an Artificial Intelligence Excellence Award winner. Additionally, VISION was nominated for the UX Design Awards. 

Most recently, SoftSmile had the privilege of serving as a platinum sponsor of the 2023 Treatment Planning in Aligner Orthodontics Congress. Our team traveled to Hamburg, Germany to demonstrate VISION and our other offerings to a global group of distinguished orthodontists.  

Looking ahead to 2024 we will have a renewed focus on SoftSmile Design Services. SoftSmile’s offerings are not limited to VISION treatment planning software, we offer an entire ecosystem for aligner cases. 

By utilizing our Web Portal and Web Viewer, doctors can upload patient scans and receive and review a completed setup within 48 hours. The number of design cases we create has been growing over the last half of the year. 

The future of SoftSmile continues to shine bright.