scanO is an AI oral-health screening platform used by 1,000+ dental clinics across nine countries. We started in Pune in 2020 with one belief: the mouth is the most under-screened part of the body — and AI is the only way to change that at population scale.
These are not obscure statistics. They are the WHO's headline numbers from its 2022 Global Oral Health Status Report — and they have been getting worse, not better, for thirty years.
The reason isn't that we don't know how to treat these diseases. We do. The reason is that almost none of them are caught early. Most people don't see a dentist until something hurts. By then, a cavity is a root canal. A lesion is a biopsy. A bleeding gum is a lost tooth. Prevention is the cheapest, kindest, most effective medicine humanity has ever invented — and oral health is the part of medicine where we use it the least.
scanO exists to close that gap.
scanO was started in Pune in 2020 by Dr. Vidhi Bhanushali and Rajat Kabade.
Vidhi is a gold medalist in pediatric dentistry, and she had done what most dentists spend a career working toward: she had built a thriving dental practice of her own in Pune. From inside her own chair, she kept seeing the same thing — patients arriving too late. A young professional with a molar that should have been a five-minute fix three years earlier. A parent who only thought to bring their child in once the pain had started. The treatment was never the hard part. The seeing was. Most mouths in the world simply never get looked at by anyone qualified until pain forces the question.
Rajat is a self-taught tech entrepreneur who had spent over a decade building products, communities and companies. He kept being pulled back to one conviction: computer vision was finally getting good enough to do, at scale, the kind of pattern-spotting that until now had needed a trained human eye and a clinic appointment.
They met around a simple question. What if a scan of the mouth could be as routine, as fast, and as un-intimidating as checking your weight? What if a dentist anywhere in the world could, in ten seconds, see what would otherwise take an X-ray, a chair, and twenty minutes of guesswork to find?
Vidhi gave up an established, successful practice to chase that question. That is the bet scanO was founded on.
We were a consumer app first.
In our earliest version, scanO went directly to patients. Download the app, take a few photos of your mouth, get an AI-generated oral-health report. It was beautiful, it worked, and people loved telling their friends about it. For a while, it looked like the obvious shape of the company.
It wasn't.
Two things became clear, fast. First, a screening is not an outcome. A patient who learns at 11 p.m., through a phone app, that they have early decay on a lower molar does not reliably end up in a dentist's chair. They forget. They postpone. They Google. The screening was real; the treatment was not. Second, we were not alone in discovering this — it is one of the best-documented patterns in all of digital health.
The realisation we came to — and that we now believe is the single most important strategic insight in scanO's history — is this: in preventive oral health, the dentist is not optional. The clinic is not a distribution channel. The clinic is the point at which a screening becomes a habit, a treatment, a follow-up, a paying relationship, and a saved tooth. Reach the patient without the dentist, and you've built a curiosity. Reach the patient through the dentist, and you've built healthcare.
So we rebuilt scanO as a B2B2C platform — with the dental clinic at the centre.
We took the AI we had spent years training and put it into the hands of the people who actually close the loop on care: dentists. We built hardware — scanO air — so the scan could happen in the clinic, in ten seconds, with no technician needed. We built scanO Engage so the clinic could manage what came next: the recall, the treatment plan, the patient due back in six months. We kept scanO Care, our patient app — but as the back half of a clinical relationship, not a replacement for one.
That pivot is why scanO works.
scanO is one connected ecosystem of products, each designed to make the clinic better at finding disease early and acting on it.
Three AI models are live today — Tooth AI for hard-tissue conditions, Predict AI for disease-progression forecasting, and TissueAI for soft-tissue screening including pre-cancerous and cancerous indicators. More are on the roadmap.
These numbers are not destinations. They are checkpoints — the next ten million scans is what we wake up thinking about.
scanO is a Pune-headquartered company with active customers in nine countries. We don't measure our reach in office locations — we measure it in clinics. Real practices, real dentists, real patients, scanning mouths every day.
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From a research idea to a global preventive-oral-health platform — and where we go next.
We publish this roadmap because we expect to be held to it.
Not downloads. Not signups. The number of oral-health scans happening in the world because scanO exists — the thing that actually changes outcomes.
A billion people for whom an oral-health screening is no longer a once-in-a-decade accident, but a routine, expected, unremarkable part of being alive. A billion mouths is not a marketing number — it is the only number large enough to mean we have actually solved the problem we set out to solve.
We are not there yet. We are at the start of a curve. But the shape of the curve is right — and we know what every next million looks like.
Around 45 people, in Pune and across our markets — product builders, dentists, designers, clinical scientists, engineers, sales leads, support specialists, operations and finance — who chose to spend the best years of their careers on a problem most of the world isn't paying attention to. We won't list them all here. But the most honest sentence on this page is this: none of scanO's progress would have been possible without them — and most of the credit for the milestones above belongs to them.
A gold medalist in pediatric dentistry who built and ran an established dental practice in Pune — and gave it up to start scanO. Vidhi leads the clinical, product and partnership thinking at scanO, and is the reason our AI is trusted by the dentists who actually use it.
A self-taught tech entrepreneur who has spent over a decade building products, communities and companies. Rajat leads product & the growth roadmap at scanO — and writes publicly about building AI products for emerging markets.