Dandy

Liquid AI

Dandy

Vertical SaaS plus manufacturing. Dandy provides dental practices with intraoral scanners (often subsidized or free to eliminate the switching cost), cloud-based software for managing cases, and its own network of digital dental labs that manufacture the final restorations.

Dentists pay per case — each crown, bridge, veneer, or implant restoration is priced individually. The margin comes from manufacturing efficiency: digital workflows are faster, more precise, and require less manual labor than traditional hand-sculpted methods.

As volume grows, Dandy's labs get more efficient and per-unit costs drop. It's the classic razor-and-blades model — give away the scanner, make money on every restoration.

Liquid AI

Liquid AI builds foundation models, the big general-purpose brains that power chatbots and other AI tools. The difference is efficiency.

Their models, called Liquid Foundation Models, are designed to do more with far less memory and computing power. Companies pay to use them, either through a cloud API or by running the models on their own machines.

That second option matters. A bank or a hospital often cannot send private data to someone else's server.

Liquid AI lets them keep the model in-house. The pitch to a customer is basically this.

You get strong AI without renting a mountain of expensive chips.

Dandy

Henry Stott was a repeat entrepreneur who had previously co-founded a tech company in the UK. When he looked at the dental industry, he saw a $15 billion lab market that was shockingly analog.

Here's how it worked: a dentist jams a tray of gooey putty into your mouth, waits for it to harden, mails the physical mold to a dental lab, where a technician hand-sculpts your crown out of ceramic. Turnaround: 2 to 3 weeks.

Error rate: high. Patient experience: miserable.

The technology to do this digitally had existed for years — 3D intraoral scanners, CAD/CAM software, CNC milling machines — but nobody had stitched it into a seamless end-to-end platform for the average dental practice. Stott started Dandy in 2020 to be that platform.

Provide the scanner, build the software, run the lab — and make it so easy that any dentist can switch from analog to digital without changing how they practice.

Liquid AI

Liquid AI is a spinout from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, better known as CSAIL. The core science came from Ramin Hasani, who spent his PhD studying the nervous system of a tiny worm called C.

elegans. That worm has just 302 neurons and still manages to move, hunt, and react to its world.

Hasani and his collaborators asked a simple question. What if you built an AI that worked more like those neurons and less like a giant static network?

The answer was the liquid neural network, a model whose internal wiring keeps adjusting even after training is done. The team incorporated the company in 2023.

Daniela Rus, who runs CSAIL and is one of the most respected robotics researchers alive, came on as a co-founder. So did Mathias Lechner and Alexander Amini, both longtime research partners of Hasani.

Dandy

Land-and-expand with dental practices. Dandy gives practices the scanner for free or at heavy discount, which eliminates the biggest barrier to switching from analog.

Once a practice starts submitting digital scans, they become recurring revenue — every patient who needs a crown is a Dandy order. Sales team targets mid-size practices (3 to 10 dentists) that are high-volume but haven't invested in digital yet.

Referral programs where existing dentists recommend Dandy to colleagues. Geographic density strategy — build lab capacity in a region, then saturate practices nearby to optimize logistics and turnaround times.

Content marketing educating dentists on why digital is better, faster, and more profitable than analog workflows.

Liquid AI

The growth angle is size, or the lack of it. Most frontier models are so heavy they only run in data centers.

Liquid AI aims for models light enough to run on a phone, a car, or a factory robot. That opens doors the giants cannot easily reach.

The AMD partnership pushes the same idea. AMD makes chips, and it wants efficient models that show off its hardware.

So AMD led the Series A and became both an investor and a distribution partner. Liquid AI also releases open models to researchers, which builds a following before the sales team ever makes a call.

Dandy

Dental practices are notoriously resistant to change — many dentists have used the same lab for 20 years and switching feels risky. The scanner hardware is expensive to subsidize at scale, creating a capital-intensive land grab.

Quality control across distributed manufacturing is hard — a crown that doesn't fit means a remake, an unhappy patient, and a dentist who might switch back to their old lab. Competition from established digital players like Align Technology and legacy lab companies investing in their own digital capabilities.

The dental industry is fragmented — 200,000+ practices in the US, mostly small businesses, which means enterprise-style sales don't work. Each practice is its own decision maker with its own habits.

Liquid AI

The honest problem is Goliath. OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and Meta have raised tens of billions of dollars between them.

Liquid AI has raised under $300 million. The transformer architecture those giants use is battle-tested and improving fast.

Liquid AI has to prove its different approach not only works but keeps working as models get bigger. Betting against the most successful design in AI history is bold.

It is also the kind of bet that ends in either a great acquisition or a quiet shutdown, with not much room in between.

Dandy

Dandy Scanner — provided to dental practices, captures a full 3D digital impression of the patient's mouth in minutes. No more putty molds.

Cloud-based case management platform where dentists submit scans, approve designs, and track orders. AI-powered restoration design that generates crown and veneer designs automatically from 3D scans, reducing turnaround from weeks to days.

Digital dental lab network with automated CNC milling and 3D printing for manufacturing restorations. Shade matching technology using AI to color-match restorations to surrounding teeth.

Integration with practice management software so cases flow seamlessly from scan to delivery.

Liquid AI

The main products are the Liquid Foundation Models, a family that ships in several sizes so a customer can pick the smallest one that does the job. The second generation, LFM2, arrived in 2025, including LFM2-VL vision-language models built for phones, laptops, wearables and embedded chips.

The company has leaned hard into on-device AI rather than the cloud. The focus is always the same.

Match the quality of a much larger model while using a fraction of the memory and power.

Dandy

Investors include Bessemer Venture Partners, IVP, DST Global, and IA Ventures. Series C in 2023 valued the company at approximately $1.8 billion.

Liquid AI

It started with a $37.5 million two-stage seed in December 2023 at a $303 million valuation, from OSS Capital, PagsGroup, Automattic (the company behind WordPress), Samsung Next and others. Angels included GitHub co-founder Tom Preston-Werner, Shopify's Tobi Lütke and Red Hat co-founder Bob Young.

Then AMD Ventures led the $250 million Series A in December 2024, which is unusual because AMD is a chipmaker, not a typical venture fund. That backing gave Liquid AI both money and a hardware ally.

When a major chip company writes the lead check on an efficiency-focused model maker, it signals a bet that the future of AI is not just bigger, it is leaner.