Curve Dental Announces $200 Million R&D Investment

Record-breaking year-over-year growth since 2018, driven by rapid customer adoption, has enabled Curve to reinvest tens of millions of dollars each year in product development and customer services. The company is rapidly approaching $100 million in annual recurring revenue, almost entirely generated through organic growth.

With around 20% of the cloud dental practice market, Curve is fulfilling its promise to deliver best-in-class native functionality for single-location, small-group, and DSO practices—without requiring customers to contract with and manage multiple software vendors. Recognizing market demand for an open platform, Curve's API capability supports vendor integrations that meet rigorous standards for quality, security, reliability, interoperability and customer experience. 

Dave Cormack, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Curve Dental and a 40-year veteran of high-growth software companies, reflected on the company's journey:

"Nine years ago, today's leadership team at Curve, having previously grown Brightree from a startup to the most successful cloud software platform in the homecare market, fell in love with the opportunity to deliver the most compelling solution for the dental industry when we saw that close to 100% of the market was relying on 20- to 30-year-old client-server solutions. No other opportunity in healthcare came close.

"We acquired Curve Dental because it provided an excellent foundation for us to build a fully integrated, end-to-end cloud platform. In my experience, multi-practice software cannot be scaled down for single locations or small-group practices. It must be built natively from the ground up—and that is exactly what we did.

"After $100 million of R&D investment in the last eight years, Curve has continually modernized into a fully native, single sign-on platform for solo practices to small multi-location groups and DSOs, including patient engagement, intelligent phone integration, advanced eligibility, credit card payments, auto payment posting, RCM, membership plans, orthodontics workflow, business intelligence and more. Curve is giving the dental industry a new way to practice and a better way to grow."

Investing for the Long Term

Cormack said Curve's financial position gives practices confidence that the company will continue investing for the long term:

"As a $100 million annual recurring revenue business, we are profitable and growing while reinvesting tens of millions of dollars each year in product development and customer services. As such, the dental market can be confident that we are here for the long term.

"My strong advice to any dental practice considering a move to a cloud system is to make sure that the software vendor is profitable, so it can continue to reinvest, and compare what they plan to spend on research and development against Curve's $200 million commitment."

Reflecting on Curve's extensive R&D commitment and what he believes will be a major consolidation of the dental software market, Cormack said:

"Our leadership has lived this journey many times and, as they say, we've seen this movie before, bought the T-shirt, and we always deliver for our customers.

"With 85% of the roughly 160,000 dental practices in North America still on a legacy client-server system, Curve will focus all its efforts on delivering the most compelling native end-to-end cloud platform in the market—one that meets the needs of practices of all sizes and stages of growth, so that they'll never outgrow Curve.

"We will achieve that by continuing to hire and retain great people who have a passion and desire to delight our customers. It's the only way."

A Market at an Inflection Point

Cormack believes the shift from legacy client-server systems to integrated cloud platforms will also drive significant consolidation across the dental software market over the next several years.

"A dental software death spiral is upon us. As the market rapidly shifts from legacy systems to the cloud, the vendor market across the ecosystem is oversaturated—from core practice-management platforms to add-on solutions for patient engagement, analytics, imaging and more.

"But moving to the cloud is only part of the equation. Practices should look beyond the cloud label to understand how a platform has actually been built and how well its products work together. While Curve has been 100% natively-built, many competitors have acquired a mismatched collection of products that leaves practices with fragmented data, multiple user interfaces, inconsistent workflows and integration complexity. These platforms do anything but operate as one unified system.

"I predict that over 40 percent of practice management software vendors, with an alarming number burning through cash to buy market share at the expense of R&D and customer services, will not exist in 36 to 48 months. The same pressure will affect point solutions that create more complexity than differentiated customer value, as AI-driven cloud platforms increasingly deliver those capabilities natively in a fully integrated manner and at a lower total cost of ownership than practices currently employ through licensing software from five or six different vendors.

Cormack concluded by returning to Curve's commitment to its customers:

"Our customers' success is how we measure our own success. We work to earn their business every single day by listening, responding promptly and continually keeping the Curve Hero platform ahead of our competition.

"If you haven't seen Curve in action recently—or at all—I encourage you to talk with us about the challenges you face and see how we can better serve you."

About Curve Dental

Curve Dental provides an intelligent, cloud-based operating platform designed to help dental practices manage and grow their businesses while giving teams more time to focus on patient care. Curve brings together practice management, clinical workflows, revenue cycle capabilities, payments, patient engagement, artificial intelligence, and an expanding ecosystem of connected solutions in one platform built for modern dentistry. Curve Dental serves dental professionals and practices across the United States and Canada and is privately held, with operations in Provo, Utah; Alpharetta, Georgia; Calgary, Alberta; and Aberdeen, Scotland.

Curve Dental is proud to be named a 2026 USA TODAY Top Workplaces award winner. Visit www.curvedental.com or call 1-888-910-HERO for more information.

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SOURCE Curve Dental