Medsider: Learn from Medtech and Healthtech Founders and CEOs - Finding the Clinical Need Hiding in Plain Sight: Interview with LightForce CEO Alfred Griffin

Episode Date: May 4, 2026

In this episode of Medsider Radio, we sat down with Alfred Griffin, co-founder and CEO of LightForce.LightForce is the developer of the world's first fully customized 3D-printed bracket system directly personalized for each patient's digital treatment plan.Alfred holds a DMD and PhD in Craniofacial Biology from the Medical University of South Carolina and completed his orthodontic residency at Harvard School of Dental Medicine, where he currently serves as faculty and the Board of Fellows. An ABO-certified practicing orthodontist, he continues to see patients every month while running the company.In this interview, Alfred shares how applying existing technology to an overlooked market can unlock a larger opportunity, how adoption friction is a design problem, and why scaling a new category requires treating operations as a core product investment.Before we dive into the discussion, I wanted to mention a few things:First, if you’re into learning from medical device founders and CEOs and want to know when new interviews are live, head over to Medsider.com and sign up for our free newsletter.And if you’re ready to level up your medtech game, you should check out Medsider Courses — 8-week masterclasses covering topics like fundraising, M&A and exit planning, design and development, clinical and regulatory strategy, and commercialization.These courses, featuring hard-earned lessons from elite medtech CEOs, can be purchased individually or come free with our All-Access Pass.If you'd rather read than listen, here's a link to the full interview with Alfred Griffin.KEY MOMENTS FROM THE INTERVIEW(02:43) - How growing up in a family of dentists shaped Alfred’s path into orthodontics (07:41) - How LightForce uses digital planning and 3D printing to create fully customized braces (08:48) - Why LightForce isn’t a brilliant idea, but an obvious fix for the teen braces market that aligners missed (12:19) - How LightForce is like Google Maps for teeth, eliminating detours and removing inefficiencies (17:30) - How Alfred built LightForce around his clinical strengths and hired for experience to round out the gaps (30:56) - The 3-part secret to LightForce adoption by physicians (36:42) - How Alfred approaches fundraising, matching investors to the company’s stage and needs (41:51) - About LightForce’s digital factories and why they’re the company’s core moat

It's also part of the product strategy when you think about it is like any new feature, any new thing we add on, and this might be helpful for other folks, is, you know, think about the new stuff. Does it remove things someone needs to learn or does it add things that people need to learn to use the product? Because anything you add that needs to be learned will create more friction. Welcome to Medsider, where you can learn from the brightest founders and CEOs in medical devices and health technology. Join tens of thousands of ambitious doers as a lot of the bestider, we unpack the insights, tactics, and secrets behind the most successful life science startups in the world. Now here's your host, Scott Nelson. Hey everyone, in this episode of MedSider, I sat down with Alfred Griffin, co-founder and CEO of Lightforce. Lightforce is the developer of the first fully customized 3D printed bracket system directly personalized for each patient's digital treatment plan. Alfred holds a DMD and Ph.D. in craniofacial biology from the Medical University

of South Carolina and completed his orthodonic residency at Harvard. School of Dental Medicine, where he currently serves as faculty and the Board of Fellows. An ABO certified practicing orthodontist, he continues to see patients every month while running the company. Here are a few topics we explored in this conversation. First, how do you identify treatment gaps hiding inside markets that already look fully served? Second, what does it take to build a new category beyond just building a better product? Third, what drives adoption when your product requires change across clinical, operational, and economic domains simultaneously? And last, how do you treat scaling as a product problem rather than a logistics one?

Before we dive into the full episode, if you're a MedTech founder or CEO preparing to raise capital, you should check out the MedSiter fundraising cohort. This four-week live workshop combines small group sessions with real-time feedback to help you sharpen your investor story, build a targeted investor pipeline, and run a focused fundraising sprint instead of a never-ending slog. Over the month, you'll walk away with an investor-ready narrative and deck, outreach scripts that actually get responses, a refreshed LinkedIn profile, simple content plan that keeps you on investors radar and a repeatable system for running your raise. You can join the waitlist at medsider.com forward slash fundraising cohort. Again, that's

medsider.com forward slash fundraising cohort. All right, let's get to the interview. All right, Alfred, welcome to Medsider Radio. Appreciate you covering out a little bit of time on this Monday. I'm sure your schedule's jam-packed running life force. But yeah, appreciate it coming on. I'm excited to be here, Scott. Yeah, likewise. So with that said, I recorded a very short bio at the outside of this interview, but let's start kind of hearing it from you first. Give us a kind of a two-minute elevator-style pitch on your journey before founding the company. Man, well, the simplest way to describe my background is the way one of the analysts at Steve will refer to me at a meeting. They called me an inbred dentite, which I think stems from the fact that both

my mom and my dad are dentists. As you can imagine, I grew up going to dental conferences for family vacations because they're tax write-offs. We talked about teeth. at the dinner table and it's just a world I grew up in and, you know, had a lot of passion for. We grew up on in a small town. We had cows and, you know, a farm and, you know, horses and things like that. But it was a small town. So you go to the grocery store and I hated going to the grocery store because like everyone wanted to talk to my parents. I could never get out. And then they'd show them their teeth in public. And outside of that being a little bit weird, it also helped me appreciate, man, you can have a huge impact in a community as a dentist. And so he's always something I wanted to

pursue, given that both my parents were dentists in addition to my grandfather, uncles, cousins, things like that. I wanted to have an impact in the field that my family cared so much about. I did a DMD PhD. Instead of just doing a DMD, which just turned into a seven-year program instead of four, which makes me a bit of a glutton for academic punishment. I went to the 27th grade, which I don't recommend. But it taught me a lot. You originally wanted to have an impact in orthodontics by altering biology, which is why I went up to Boston to Harvard for my residency as a scientist and kind of pivoted

once I realized what a phase one, two, three clinical trial costs and what the market would be for a biological intervention to move teeth faster. So then we looked at, all right, can we move teeth more efficiently biologically or would it be better to control the physics. And ultimately, hey, let's control the physics. There's a massive opportunity here looking at the teen market, which is served by braces. One thing your listeners may not know is that Generation Alpha is going to get the same braces that their grandparents got, which is pretty surprising, given the advancements in technology and innovation and MedTech and all the incredible founders and CEOs in your podcast. And we saw what digital orthonics did to the aligner world.

we created a market for adult orthodontics that previously didn't exist. I mean, you used to have, you know, 40, 50-year-old men and women come into your practice, and they just wouldn't get treatment because they didn't want braces. And aligners came in, and they unlocked this huge market, which is phenomenal for everybody. If you think about an abundance mentality, it turned into a very good thing for the profession and for the world. It had great impact. And they did that by applying modern technologies, such as CAD, Sons,

software, such as 3D printing. Aligners were not invented by the aligner companies. They were invented, like back in 1946, what changed was that those technologies enabled aligners to scale. And so I thought that was a really interesting take. And when I was going through residency, I remember I used to upload every one of my cases, whether it was an aliner case or a bracket case into an aliner software just to see how does that puzzle come together? Are the teeth the right are the jaws the right relationships? How do those teeth and those jaws come together the right way to create the best aesthetic and functional result for a patient? Because the goal of treatment is not straight teeth. It's far more than that than people realize. If you're thinking about your

son or daughter, you would want to know these things. And the problem was the only output of that software is a clear liner, which is not a great fit for the biggest market in orthodonics. Roughly 75% of orthonic patients are teens and adolescents that have never been treated before, they've got erupting teeth. Aesthetically, you know, it's a sensitive stage in life. And aligners have two main problems with that population. One is biomechanics. Aliners are really good at pushing teeth.

They're not good at pulling teeth. And so if you can imagine like pulling upper incisors down or rotating premolars, uprighting molars. I'll save some of the clinical details, but they're not good at that. They can push. They can't really pull well. And the second main thing is compliance, which simply means aligners only work if they're on your teeth. And as an orthodontist, I know that, and I love aligners, but the number of times I've heard a teenager say, my dog ate my aligners, or I put my aligners in a napkin at school and it got thrown away. Like that results in the aligners not being on the patient's teeth.

And so you know, you're two into treatment. And mom and dad are not blaming the aligner company. They're definitely not blaming their precious son or daughter. They're blaming you. And then you've got to put braces on the kid. It's just not a great experience. So we said, all right, there's got to be a better way. What if we can apply some of those amazing technologies

that enabled clear aligner production to the bigger market of braces? And that's really, you know, where it came back to our, if we're going to have an impact in orthodontics, the best way is to control physics by applying those technologies to create a scalable braces solution that is meant for the patient. Got it. So tell us a little bit more about the technology because I think that that's a great backdrop. And I know we're certainly going to get into the kind of the deeper journey, right, starting the company and kind of what you've been through and where it's at today,

then lessons are along the way. But, but for those that aren't as familiar with your technology, I'm, on the website right now, which is LF.com. So Lightforce, it's LF, like the letters, LF.com. We'll lead to it in the full write-up on Medsider. But give us a sense for like how this is distinctly different, because I think for most people that are listening, they're like, I mean, less than 5% chance that they're not familiar with braces and probably similar percentile that's unfamiliar with aligners as well. But give us a sense for kind of how this is different and whether it's related to like the mechanics itself or even just kind of the workflow of a typical kind of patient.

Yeah, I mean, as I mentioned earlier, you know, the braces that Gen Alpha is getting today are the same ones that their grandparents got. What I mean by that is that braces that are used are made for nobody. They're made for the average. And they're kept in a box in a closet and orthodontist office. And when a patient walks in, you take the same bracket out and you stick it by line of sight on the patient's tooth. The orthodontist does this where they think they go. And again, it's a bracket made for nobody. So then we have to see the patient back for tightenings every four to six weeks because we're not really sure where the teeth are going.

We've got to monitor this stuff. We're reactive. Compare that to clear liner treatment where a patient comes in and you take a scan and you design the outcome. So you're starting with the end in mind versus being reactive. And so what we're doing at Lightforce is we're applying that same concept, that same clinical concept where a patient comes in, you take a scan of their teeth, collect all the data, all the records. And then the orthodontist plans where should those teeth end up for that patient, for their smile, their soft tissue, their jaw relationships. What's the best outcome for them?

Their tooth sizes. And then we plan braces that will only get them to that position. So it's the same kind of approach as aligners. We're starting with the end in mind. Now, what that results in, Scott, is that we don't need to see the patient every four to six weeks because we're not being reactive. We're being proactive. We can see the patient every 10 to 10.

12 weeks or sometimes longer, depending on what the orthodontist wants to do. And what that results in is you get 43% shorter treatment time and 60% fewer visits, which, as you can imagine, has a huge impact on the experience for the patient. But it's not just that. Oftentimes, you can only get cost, quality, speed. In this case, you kind of get everything, because you also get a quantifiably better outcome for your patient. Got it. What were those two stats again in terms of reduction in in in in time so like the time that someone has to wear where the braces what were those two stats again 43 percent shorter treatment time wow okay and that that can be anywhere between eight and 10 months and then 60 percent fewer visits which is turns into about a year less

treatment and six to eight fewer visits and this is actually data coming from a clinical trial that was just published last month in a theory of your journal say for example i'm walking into your clinic. You're still practicing full time as an example. And you're pitching me on this new alternative, right, light force. It's instead of maybe a two-year window of wearing these, wearing, you know, traditional braces, it's now, let's call it, I don't know, 14 months, 14, 15 months, something like that. And then I have to come in less for these tightenings, right? So instead of coming in every four to six weeks, it's like I come in every 10, 12, 14 weeks, roughly, something like that. That's exactly right. And then, oh, by the way, as if this was an infomercial, right? And there's one more thing.

You're actually going to get a better result. That seems pretty compelling. That's a pretty compelling pitch. You have me leaning in with six kids myself, right? Yeah. Oh, wow. Seriously. If you add up the trips to the orthodontist that you have in front of you,

my friend, that should be quite some savings. We've got three that I've already been through it. But that's why it's like, you know, I think most people listening, they've been, they've got kids, right, that have been through the typical kind of braces, you know what I mean? And so, yeah, it's like, this is interesting. Yeah, I mean, certainly, certainly, certainly I'm, you have me leaning in. It's interesting, Scott.

It's not a brilliant idea. I mean, like, if you're an orthodonist, this is, it's pretty obvious. You know, we're used to at the end of treatment, repositioning braces by hand. We're used to bending wire. And those are the painful appointments for patients that they commonly refer to as the tightening. You can still do that with light force if you need to, but you really shouldn't need to once you master the technology. Because it's like every tooth in your mouth is taking a direct flight. versus a round trip flight.

It's kind of funny. It's like you might remember when Google Maps replaced the paper map, your parents glove box, like your parents didn't drive faster. They stopped getting lost. They stopped meeting co-pilots. They stopped asking for directions. They stopped driving late. Taking the cenof route was a choice not a wrong term they would take.

The drive is actually always that short. They just couldn't see it. So the same concept is true when we think about light force. When light force replaces the stock braces at your orthodontist office, tooth movement is not going to speed up biologically. The waist just disappears. The tightenings, the tightening, the extra appointments, the wire bending. That was never part of treatment. That was just the cost of using a tool that was not designed for your son or daughter. Right. Yeah. Super like I just like taking a step back. The traditional like I'm going to call them braces market. It's unsophisticated way to

describe it. But the braces market, such a huge market. Right. And everyone is familiar with kind of the innovation that's happened with aligners, right? And the success story, I would say the large success story, but multiple success stories there. But you almost kind of, you forget about like what happens in the big part of the middle, right, the messy middle, if you will, right? There's lots of room for improvement and different ways to do this. And obviously, you're solving for it.

So very, very interested to kind of learn a little bit more about the journey getting to where we're at now, you know, recording this in early Q2, 2006. But give us a sense for kind of where the company's at right now for those that may listen to this, you know, three, four months down the road. We started this company as a, we got funded back in 2017. And obviously the first goal was proof of concept, getting regulatory approval. We bonded our first patients in 2018, about the same time we got regulatory approval. We started a beta in 2019. And these were with braces that were very white. They were not translucent. I mean, we had the decision. We could either make braces in ceramic, metal, or plastic.

metal, we couldn't 3D print at a resolution. You need to 3D print this to be able to scale it. The way braces are traditionally made is via injection molding, where you stamp out the same thing as many times as you can, and then you get that economy of scale where if your mold costs a million bucks, your first brackets are a million, your 1 millionth is a dollar. You can't change the shape. You can't customize it for the patient, whereas 3D printing,

change in part complexity come free. So we knew we needed to 3D print. So we're really looking at, all right, what are the limits of 3D printing at the time? For metal, it was not there. Metal 3D printing applications were more focused on aerospace automotive, which meant bigger parts where they had different application requirements that didn't need to be as high resolution, but had maybe thermodynamic requirements that we didn't have.

So metal was not there. Plastic for biocomp reasons, aesthetic reasons, wasn't a good fit either. It also wasn't strong enough. And then enter ceramic. So we started with ceramic. Seramic was there. You could make ceramic tiny parts. There's technology that's used for casting cores.

And we said, all right, this could make sense for our application. So we investigated it, doubled down. It wasn't aesthetic at first. Like I said, we called them the AirPods for your teeth because they were totally white. And there had never been white braces in the history of orthodontics. But we leaned into it. And then in 21, our material science team found a way to make them clear. And then we started making them for the molar teeth as well.

We had a complete product in 22. and updated a lot of software, you know, figured out how to scale it, which is, there's a whole story. And then, you know, fast forward to today, we've treated nearly 200,000 patients. Wow. And we're in 51 out of the 66 residences, orthodontic programs in North America require their residents to use light force today. Wow. So as I said, you know, this is something that makes a lot of sense.

It's like asking an orthodontist is the sky blue. Is this going to be the future of the profession? It absolutely will be. And you're in, you said 51 of the, how many total residency? 66. Wow, wow. So almost nearly like almost all of them. Okay.

What are the last 10 doing? Like, come on. Like what's going on with the last 10? It's not necessarily the chairman or chairman. It's the legal departments. Things just need a little slower. Yeah, I got it. Got it.

Can't fault them for. That's super helpful. But again, everyone listening, LF.co is the website. LF.com. I'm sure you're probably, this is probably compelling technology. I don't think I'm the only one that's like, this is super interesting. I haven't heard of this quite yet. So even if you're largely listening to this interview from a business perspective, you probably get kids or you know of friends that have kids that should know more about this, more about this tech. So with that said, let's spend the next

maybe 20, 30 minutes kind of going through your journey building light force, Alfred. And I want to start out with kind of this clinician to founder story, because that's, although that's not maybe a typical per se. What is what is maybe non-traditional is the fact that you're still running the company as CEO, right? Like almost 10 years later now, that is unique. So you just started to kind of like stay in the pocket, right, and stay in the saddle, driving the ship forward, which I think is probably credit to your ability to kind of adapt and evolve with like the changing needs of the business. So, you know, when you think back about your, you know, your journey, are like maybe one or two things that really stand out and maybe frame this for other clinicians or physicians, whoever

they are right in their capacity that have have an idea maybe want to take a swing like what are a couple things that really stand out like that's that's been impactful for your your journey so far well first of all there there are a lot of people to think who enable this i mean i think one one thing is really important is having a very strong sense of self-awareness knowing what you're great at knowing what you're not great at and being very intellectually honest about that and then building your company around those strengths so one of our HR tenants from day one has always been focusing on building a collection of strengths versus an absence of weaknesses. And as a clinician, and I am still an orthodontist, I saw patients last Friday.

So two days a month, I'm in clinic. You know, that's a real strength for the company when someone who, when you're making very important high-level strategic decisions as a CEO, having the context of what your customers go through every day using your product. And not every piece of data is going to come through your business. data center. You're not going to get every metric that's relevant to your business. Some of the things are going to be qualitative and some of the decisions will not be made just through data, but also through instinct or a combination thereof. And as a clinician, having that close

tie to both the product, but also the user in the market, I think really helps inform some good decisions and enables you to go deep into a certain topic if you need to. But then, you know, looking around the company, that's not the only thing that matters, right? So that's, that's one strength, but I'd say, you know, one of the voids I have is, you know, this is my first job. So I haven't run a large company or scale complex operations before. So or large engineer teams, things like that. So it's really important to find the best people you can to run those and give them the autonomy to make those decisions within the strategic framework of the company's initiatives. So that and seeking expertise, like, you know, surround yourself with great people,

people that have been there. One of the ways we got connected was obviously through Erica Rogers, who's on our board, someone who has immense admiration for her. She was a CEO of Silk Road for many years, did incredible things over there, built an incredible culture, other board members, other investors as well. I got lucky with very on, very early on. It's important, obviously, who you take money from matters a lot. You're just not taking capital.

You're also taking advice. guidance. So it was very lucky to work with some incredible early stage investors who helped point me in the right direction and believe in me in the vision. The people that took the leap of faith to join me on this mission as well, massive kudos to them. I think we all learned a lot in the process and all brought those strengths. And that combination is really what would enable this. Yeah. No, I love the fact that you're still practicing even to this day. You said two days a month. It reminds me of a, this was, I think it may be last week I saw, it was just a clip of the interview. I haven't listened to the full thing, but I believe it was Mark and Dresen.

I think that was, it might have been the founders podcast, but he was talking about, he was comparing what happened in the early days of like some big tech companies like Oracle as an example where the CEO as the company scaled and grew, there was so much distance between the CEO and the, and the C-suite and the customer. It was ultimately hard to get to the truth of what was actually going on inside the company because you've had all these different layers. And he compared it to like how Elon, I think, runs most of his companies where it's like there's very, very little distance between the C suite and the customer. It's, it's quite flat, actually. And individual contributors are actually

very highly valued in terms of like, you know, there's not this classic scenario where ICs want to get into management. And then they, it's so easy for any of us to lose sight of like what's actually, what's the customer going through. And I don't know, like that really stands out the fact that you're still, you're still seeing, you're still in practice. You're still seeing, patients just like you're that much closer to not only the end the user but also like what is a typical orthodontics clinic still still going through what challenges they have and that's like that's so so critical i think maybe it's more critical when you're when you're building something that's not a commodity but a differentiated new technology and that's what this is this is not like another clear

liner it's a totally new technology in orthodontics and when you're doing that i think you have to another thing we say is you have to hire athletes people that are good at learning new things quickly because there's no playbook, there's no blueprint for what you're building. So you kind of have to really be super connected. The cycle time has to be really quick as well. And so another one of the benefits of seeing patients is it's also executive onboarding. So, you know, very commonly will bring new executives with me to clinic and they can kind of experience that in-person use of the product as well. Yeah. But yeah, I agree with you. It's a huge help. Offsets the other challenges of being a first-time CEO. So yeah, yeah, definitely. Yeah. Well,

kudos to like your investors, your board for like letting you continue to kind of, I mean, that's, that's huge. And so, because so many, so many others would like, it's just so easy to say, well, we need, we need this other person, right, they come in. They've scaled this startup before, but you lose side of the fact that like the immense domain expertise that, that you have. You know, you still are very, very close to the product, the end user, etc. But one of the other things that stood out to me, though, too, in thinking about kind of your your journey going from clinician to entrepreneur and running this company as it scales is, is the fact that you said just be intellectually, like, honest about kind of where you're at.

Because like I think so many, just like in life in general, like ego gets in the way of a lot of things, right? And, you know, we think we can do everything and don't have the, the honesty or the humility to say, you know, I mean, no, I can't actually. And I do need, you know, this other like this other function. I'm not, I'm less familiar with that. I'm not as good as that. Like, let's, let's solve for that, you know. And it sounds like that's, credit to you like that's that's been something that's kind of led to you know you know getting the company that to this to the stage is is uh is having having that sort of humility to get there well i appreciate it's a lot of talented people and a lot of support along the way yeah yeah cool

let's get to the next topic on the docket which is kind of development right early stage development and it sounds like there's just like any any startup you know you went through iterations of of the product but as a as a first time CEO like this is one of the hardest i mean it's I think it's one of the hardest things for any CEO, but especially as a first-time CEO kind of going through the minutia of this, but is like how to how to allocate resources, what are oftentimes very limited resources at those early stages, right, trying to make the necessary improvements to kind of get to that next inflection point. But when you think about those first kind of call it two, three, four years of product development, anything stand out that was particularly helpful

or maybe you know now that you, you know, wished you knew back then? Yeah, absolutely. Mass customizing braces is hard. Mass customizing anything while maintaining quality and traceability is very difficult. That was one thing that I absolutely did not appreciate and absolutely do now. So for reference today, Lightforce is one of the world's largest manufacturers of directly 3D printed medical devices. If you consider the roughly 200,000 cases that we've shipped, multiply that by something like 86 parts, individual parts, that are all very tiny. and have very high application requirements for their precision. So scaling that while maintaining quality control is a challenge.

It's hard to do that without, by just humans alone. The other challenge is traceability, which part goes, forget which to which patient, but to which tooth on which patient. So traceability is another challenge as well. This is not something that you just injection mold a bunch of times and then keep on a shelf for when you need it. It's really complex manufacturing.

And then, oh, by the way, to make that harder, you've got to get it to the doctor in a very short period of time. So these are on this on-demand manufacturing. So this is why we've had to bring in, and this is actually one of the things I'm so excited about, Scott, is the raw intellectual talent we're bringing from the tech industry into the orthodontic space. A lot of it's coming from the robotics space, X Amazon robotics, Walmart robotics. And that's absolutely required because, you know, the robotic space, you have hardware, soft, software complex operations where we have to think very critically about logistics. That is a similar skill set to what enables mass customization. And that is a bigger problem than what I initially thought it would be.

One of the benefits of being in Boston is it's the global home for 3D printing, for CAD software. There's a lot of strong med device, material science folks here in Boston, deep tech. And so a lot of talent is here, but then putting it all together under one roof, think is a non-trivial problem. Hey everyone, let's take a quick break to talk about FastWave Medical, the company I co-founded and lead as CEO. We're developing next generation intravascular lithotripsy or IVL systems to tackle complex calcific disease. Over the last few years, we've closed a series of oversubscribed

funding rounds, bringing the total investment into FastWave to over $50 million. Corporate interest in the IVL space is growing to, the $900 million acquisition of Bolt Medical by Boston Scientific in 2025, and Johnson and Johnson's $13 billion. dollar acquisition of Shockwave Medical, signal a lot of attention on emerging IBL startups like FastWave, and we're making serious progress. In addition to recently receiving our ninth patent, we've successfully completed peripheral and coronary feasibility studies and are gearing up for pivotal trials. If you're interested in investing in the fast-growing IVL market, head over to fastwavemedical.com forward slash invest. Again, that's fastwavemedical.com forward slash invest.

Now let's get back to the conversation. where it went wrong in the past is where we would outgrow one factory and then have another and then have product people and engineering people in one factory and the people building it in another whereas the real strength and opportunity is unifying that under the same roof where you have the people building it looking over the shoulders of the people that are making it it's not just a great way to improve the quality traceability and improve product performance but it's also a great way to look at technology solutions to bring down your cogs to improve your margin profile. So there's a lot of benefit to having all those smart people under one roof.

Is that how largely how you solve some of those critical kind of challenges is by simply not setting up sort of individual kind of like buildings or factories, right? Is everything like right now kind of under underwater umbrella? Everything is under under one roof in Wilmington, Massachusetts. Oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah. I'd say that's going really well. The team's, are working incredibly well together. It's a beautiful thing to watch where you see people who are so talented in their respective areas work together to solve a common problem that's never been solved before. I mean, even the innovations on the factory floor recently that involved computer vision

that solved for traceability. One of the engineers was generous enough to let me sort my own case. I submitted a case and I said, do you mind if I sort this in the factory and they let me do that? I probably brought down their average handle time, but just doing it myself. like created such an appreciation for what they built and what they they can accomplish going forward. It's just an incredible thing to watch. So separate of the tooth story, which is obviously the thing that I'm incredibly passionate about, there's a real industry 4.0 story that is being

told at Lightforce right now. Oh, yeah. That's awesome. By such talented people. Yeah. I had no idea that like everything was like literally under under one under one roof. I mean, this is a different side topic altogether. But like it kind of gives me a little bit of hope for maybe like, like, you know, the possibility of sort of reindustrializing and seeing a lot more of that type of manufacturing again here in the U.S., right? Because we've lost, I mean, we've lost so much of that over the past, you know, 20, 30 years. Yeah, it's such an opportunity for the U.S. Scott. I mean, you obviously, you know, B2B SaaS has taken a bit of a hit, but, you know, why do people look at Med Device invest in Med Device? It's because there's such a real competitive

moat with a non-volatile market. Yeah. And when you can build a company that is a new technology that can grow in the same way as a SaaS company, but has that major competitive mode around it where it's a really hard thing to scale, it's a really great position to be in. Yeah. Maybe you did realize you'd be in this position, you know, five, six, seven years ago, but I got to think, like, yeah, you're sitting pretty good, right? Because that's not, as to your point earlier, that's not easy to do, let alone nail the product, but also to build out this sort of infrastructure at scale, right, where you're doing this hundreds of thousand for hundreds of thousands, you know, maybe millions at some point of patients. That's,

that's pretty cool. That's awesome, actually, it's a better than cool. It's awesome. Let's let's switch to adoption. I think it was just especially interesting, you know, topic, given the fact that you still practice, you know, a couple times a couple times a month. When you first started introducing kind of the, let's take just the current, the current version and feel free to maybe, you know, address this earlier in the company's journey. But what, what do you think was one of the, one of the most challenging things for, for orthodont is to kind of get over the hump, so to speak, right, when adopting something like this versus, you know, versus traditional kind of metal off the shelf brackets.

It's tough because, you know, every great disruption has a few things in common. First, it removes a problem that you accept it as permanent. No one really called them problems. They just called them the process. And so when you think about, like, putting braces on as an orthodontist, like bending wires, repositioning brackets, all those extra appointments, that was just kind of accepted because we've been doing it for like, now three generals. generations. Secondly, is once you experience the new way, like the old way kind of becomes

unthinkable. So like, as I mentioned earlier, like, you're never going to refold a paper map and stick it in your glove box again. You're going to use Google Maps, right? Same thing as like, you know, with braces. God help me if I ever have to direct bond a stock set of braces on a patient's teeth. Like, it just does not feel right for me to do as an orthodox, as a clinician. And then lastly, you get back something you stop noticing was gone. So like, I guess to use the Google Maps reference. Like for drivers, it's like kind of peace of mind on the road. Like, you know where you're going. You can see it on your dashboard. For Worth and Honest, it's, it's the gift of time and knowing that you're going to be done and have an awesome outcome without

the extra, you know, seven to eight visits. So, you know, for a lot of worth and honest, it's getting the product to a point where it is easy to adopt as well. The other challenge, I would say, for any new disruptive technology, and this is a quote from Erica, which really stuck with me is that the rate of diffusion for new technology in an industry is rate limited by the new stuff people need to learn. And in orthodontics, it's not like adopting clear liners. Like it was a, you know, the solution for the adult population initially, which was like maybe 20% of your practice. For braces, it's like 80% of your practice. So the the amount of change is 4x for this versus clear liners. So you've really got to do new things. You've got to learn new things clinically.

operationally and economically. Clinically, you need to learn, you need to train your staff to put these on. You work at the top of your license. So it's like in modern medicine, you have nurse practitioners, PAs, that are now doing more. They're writing scripts and doing small procedures.

I think the same thing's going to happen in orthodontics where you have staff doing more. They're putting on the hardware. They're putting on the aligner attachments. They're putting on light force or whatever future competitor we may have. And then operationally, every patient that comes in now is a scan and a down payment, see you back in four weeks for

a delegated bonding visit. With stock braces, you can put them on that day if you have the time in your schedule, but not everybody does, and it's just a change in workflow. And then you don't have to see them as often. So there are operational changes there you have to get comfortable with. And then economically, your lab bill is higher initially. It's less than a clear liner lab bill, but it's still higher than what you pay for stock braces by two to three X, depending on what stock races use. So you've got to get comfortable and understand the cash flow implications initially getting started. Ultimately, you make way more money as measured by profit per visit, but you've got to get over those initial cash flow challenges for a SMB. And not every

orthodontist has an accountant that's helping them guide them through the change. So, you know, there are some real new things to learn as an orthodontist. And that's part of our job, is to help be facilitators of that change, help guide them, help. Help guide them. show them how other practices did it, help show them how good it can be versus, you know, continue to live with those problems that they'd before accepted as permanent. Got it. Yeah. That framework is actually really, really helpful that kind of the analogy I think of is like, you know, if you're running sprints on track and track and field, right, and you're training with a parachute, right? As a startup, you're the sprinter trying to get out

of the blocks as fast as possible. But if there's a whole host of things that need to change, right, Like that's a big parachute that's going to be, it's going to take more effort. It's going to take more time to implement. Whereas, you know, if you're only asking kind of your end user to change maybe 20% of their practice as an example, whether it's clinical, economical, et cetera, workflow, et cetera. Maybe that's a smaller parachute and you can get out faster. But like that's a, that's just really healthy to keep in mind, right? Whatever your idea is or whatever you're working on, bake that into your initial,

your initial commercialization efforts, right? Of like, how much are we asking the end user to change? because that's directly related to how fast we're going to be able to launch and what kind of challenges we're going to expect to see. Totally. And it's also part of the product strategy when you think about it is like, you know, any new feature, any new thing we add on, and this might be helpful for other folks is, you know, think about the new stuff. Does it remove things someone needs to learn or does it add things that people need to learn to use the product? Because anything you add that needs to be learned will create more friction. Yeah, yeah, no doubt. And it's not just the physician or the clinician. It's also, as you pointed out, the staff as well, right?

Whether it's nurse practitioners, nurses, techs, office folks as well, right? If there's a billing, there's a billing kind of component. Yeah, all of that really matters for sure. I'm looking at the clock and I want to be mindful of the time. And if we have a few minutes, I'd love to circle back around to kind of the digital factories, right? As kind of your team is coined, or at least we've seen that pop up in various, you know, various, as we were kind of doing research for this interview, various kind of other other pieces. But let's first talk about fundraising.

you're coming off a pretty significant round of capital that you raised. I believe, let's see here. It was in 2024. Our note say it was a $15 million around for largely growth related. But let's talk about getting this far, right? Raising this amount of capital as a first-time CEO. For other folks that haven't done this, right, maybe they've raised some friends and family that haven't raised from institutional capital. What would be like the one or two pieces of advice that they really need to get right in order to, you know, to raise their series A, to raise their series B and hopefully, you know, follow on, follow on investments as they, as they continue to execute. I think the number one thing is make sure, A, make sure you know who you're taking money from.

I think that matters a lot. It's, you know, investors are more, should be more than capital. They should be sources of guidance to get the company to the next stage. And that has implications in team building in their network of investors, analysts, things like that. Second thing is, you know, they have jobs as well. So their job is to generate a return. So like making it extremely clear how that's going to happen. How are you going to create value in the company?

And that can, you know, it varies industry to industry. Like in pharma, it's not as much about revenue, but approvals and trials. And in our world, a lot of it is about revenue. So, you know, hitting your targets, I think has a lot to do with it, especially as you get to be the later stage and the earlier stages, you know, some things that are out of your control, such as demonstrating there is a real market that exists, that is big. And I think that wasn't something I considered, but got lucky that, you know, actually, orthonics is a pretty massive. It's one of the biggest sectors in dentistry. And then showing that you can build something

that people will value. I don't think it needs to be perfect, but having an MVP that demonstrates the core thesis of the product is, is really critical. Yeah. And then I think take money when it's there is an important thing as well. I think a lot of times, a lot of the founders I've met over-optimized, for things like price and things like that. What's just most important, like ultimately what matters is, is it going to be successful? And maybe a little bit of dilution here or there or whatever. Ultimately, when the outcome is huge, no one really cares.

You shouldn't. You won't care. The last thing on that same topic is just making sure, you know, investors are really important, but I think maybe even more important is having a really talented team. So making sure that you share the equity in any way, like give meaningful grants to the people that are going to move the business the most. No one gets there alone. It always takes a team. So I think, I think those are the things I'd say.

Yeah, those are like four or five, like really good, really good points. But just to kind of double click into the importance of having the right investors around the table, a lot of those things you mentioned kind of coincide with that. And like huge market, you're operating in a massive market. You know, obviously being able to demonstrate, you know, progress as you raise, as you raise kind of each additional follow up around. But like, sometimes it sounds cliche or maybe sounds easy. it's easy to say harder to do, right? It's find the right investors that are truly partners. And I couldn't stress that like all the more.

I mean, and if you feel like, and maybe I'm just kind of, I'm going to riffing a little bit, but if you feel like you're desperate and you have to kind of, you know, fall into like a second or third option, right, to raise capital, I would maybe say pause, extend your runway, try to extend your runway a little bit longer so you can get to the next inflection point to find the right investors because you could very well. end up at being, you know, being a scenario where you take capital from the wrong partner, you actually do execute for two, three, four years and end up in a very, very bad spot, you know. And so, yeah, so crucial to take the right money from the right, from the right people.

Yeah. As a CEO, I think you have three jobs. One is culture, two is the team, and three is don't run out of money. And so, like, making sure you take the money from the right partner is really important. I think in our case, you know, we recognized very early on software was a key part of building not just the customer-facing product, but the back-end manufacturing is very software-heavy as well. So we took a lot of money from tech investors such as Matrix Partners, Tyke, Kleiner Perkins. These are not med tech specific people. These are people that typically do a lot of software. So they were immensely helpful in building out the team and the technology in the early stages to build a product. And now as we get later, we think about, all right, we're going to be a MedTech branded company. So let's bring on some awesome people such as Allied Bridge.

So that's kind of how we think about that. Yeah, that's a really good point, too, because not obviously software was already an important part of your business. But if you're in a company that's kind of straddling, I would say, I'm not even sure the best way to describe this, but kind of different areas, right, whether it's software, whether it's deep tech, whether it's manufacturing, whatever, what have you, like take advantage of that, right? because there's going to be different segments of investors that specialize in each of those areas and like all the more to go, all the more reason to go broad, right?

Totally. Yeah. So definitely something that if you use that, if you're in that, that could be strength in essence. This is what I'm trying to try to emphasize. I want to get to the rapid fire portion in this interview bit, but real quick,

kind of going back to like this idea of digital factories. Like, and maybe it just, maybe it would just like surfaced based on our research. But like, tell me a little bit more about that. Like how did like what you're operating in current infrastructure, how did that term kind of come to be this idea of like, you know, a digital, a digital factory is kind of unique. So the category we're building out, Scott, is called generative braces.

So what that means is that is that every bracket is generated from two sources of data. One is the data from the patient. That's all their dental scan, their radiographs, their cone beam CT so we can see the bone. That's one source of data. the other source of data is the orthodontist treatment plan. And from those two sources of data, the patient's data and the orthodontist plan, we generate patient-specific braces. So these are generative braces, n of one. So every part that comes out of the factory is a snowflake, unique as a snowflake or a fingerprint.

And that makes sense, right? Because teeth are as unique as fingerprints. That's why they're used in dental forensics. So the challenge from a factory perspective is that you have to, you have to, you know, use a technology that will scale that mass customization. That is a new thing in our industry. Braces have never been mass customized before. Even aligners are not directly 3D printed.

They're vacuum formed on something else. It's with a much lower, like 12x lower resolution. So it's a new challenge with no blueprint on how to do it. And it has to be made on demand. So there's a lot of bespoke technology that was never, existed before that was created solely to scale this application. That means you've got to get a lot of people that are very talented, that are extremely comfortable with ambiguity, you know, building something that only they design without clear parameters. So that's why a lot of our

product is not as much, you know, the first thing we built. It's been the scaling part of it. And quite frankly, that's been where the majority of our challenges have stemmed from is scaling it. You've heard other people say building it once is easy. Building it a million times is the way more challenging. So I can't underline that enough, at least for our application, you're not injection mold and you're not using a contract manufacturer because we have to control the process. Building an app, operationalizing that machine, that digital factory is a major moat.

And one that I'm not sure everyone fully appreciates, but it's, you know, as I started this, this is not a brilliant idea that we're building. And if that were the case, you think that other people would have done it. The reason people haven't done it is because it takes a lot of brain damage to escape. It's hard to do. Yeah, yeah. You're like literally doing the hard things, you know, to get to this point. No, that's, that's super, super impressive.

I know we don't have a lot of time. I'd love to spend even more time kind of discussing this. But it's incredible to kind of see, see what you've built. And like I said earlier, I think it's, I don't know, gives me optimism for like what re-industrialization could look like, you know, this time around, I guess. So with that said, rapid fire questions, Alfred, and feel free to expand a little bit if you want to. But first one of the docket, fast forward a year from now, what are you most excited about at Light Force over the next 12 months?

What I'm really excited about today, I'll start today and then say what this looks like a year from now. But we're launching metal braces. Remember when I first talked about the limitations of 3D printing and metal? What's really interesting, is that roughly 95% of teenagers get all metal braces, all metal braces. And when they get ceramic, they only get ceramic on the front six or the front eight teeth. So the world had never used all ceramic braces prior to light force, which means that, you know, orthones really valued the customization to use it. And so why I'm so excited about our metal launch, which is just starting in beta now with select orthodontist is that it really unlocks the market. Metal is a bit more,

it can be lower profile. You can chew on it with, you know, eat jolly ranchers and it's not going to crack, which is what a lot of teens do. And it has lower friction. So you can close spaces a lot faster clinically, which is pretty cool if you're an orthodontas. So, you know, the data that I shared with you 43% shorter treatment time, 60% fewer visits, I think we're just getting started. that's a study that was done with all ceramics, which in ceramic is amazing for the aesthetics. But then I'll tell you one other thing that's interesting is for the teen market, a lot of teens actually want metal for the aesthetics, which was a surprise to me. I guess it shouldn't have been, though, knowing adolescent psychology, you have some teenagers, you may appreciate this. But at that time in life, your sense of self is informed by your peers, not as much by yourself.

So like if your friends on your travel soccer team or AAU baseball team have metal braces, typically you want what your friend has. You don't want to stand out. So aesthetically, a lot of teenagers want metal as well. That's been a limitation for us in a lot of our practices, maybe less than Beverly Hills and Manhattan. But in other areas, you know, they say, you know, we can't use all light force because you guys don't offer metal yet. And we want.

And so my hope and I guess what I'm excited for a year from now, is to see the practices that don't have light force stock metal braces and their aligner du jour, but they have light force and their aligner du jour. And what that means is less complexity. They're only using two systems, and they have a single system for braces. That's great. I think by the time this is released, maybe the metal option will be officially, officially available, I guess, at a beta.

So yeah, pretty exciting. Last question, I know we're short on time here, but let's say we're in Boston, right? It's a group of, you know, I'm going to combine these last two questions that typically ask, but it's a group of, you know, other kind of life science, med tech entrepreneurs, and you want to leave them with like one thing, the one thing that maybe someone would, you wish someone would have whispered in your ear 10 years ago, you know, before you started the company. What would, what's that one, you know, critical thing that you think every, every med tech, life science entrepreneur needs to get right?

gain a deep understanding of your customer and the patient they serve. It sounds, and I wish I had something a bit more brilliant sounding. I think it's that simple. I think if you create something valuable and you have a deep understanding for your customers willing to pay for something or their willingness to sell something, meaning are they something they can't give up, then I think you'll know what to build and you'll be successful. Without that clarity on the roadmap, it's easy to spend a lot of money.

Yeah, that's a good, good piece of advice to kind of in the discussion with. But I know we're a little bit over, but I can't thank you enough for coming on the program. It's LF.co, company's light force, but LF.com, we'll link to it in the full write-up on Medsider. But Alfred, you're brilliant guy. Yeah, you know, that's kind of obvious, but like you tell great stories. You're a great communicator. It's been fun, fun discussion. You're very kind, Scott.

Thank you. No, I genuinely mean that. For sure, this has been fun. So I'll have you hold it in line. But for everyone listening, thanks again for your attention as always. Until the next episode of MedSenter Goes Live. Everyone, take care. Hey, it's Scott again. One quick thing before you go. You see, I love bringing you insightful conversations with the best founders and CEOs of medical device and health technology startups. But here's the thing. I'd be super grateful if you could help me reach even more ambitious doers who share our passion. So if you found value in this podcast, if you found yourself nodding your head while listening, or if you simply enjoy what we're doing with Medsider, please take a moment to leave us a review. It's super easy. Just open your Apple Podcast app or the podcast app of your choice,

search for our show and scroll down to the ratings and review section. Leave your honest thoughts and hit that five-star rating if you think we're worthy. Your feedback is incredibly important and it's the best way to ensure we keep bringing you awesome discussions with leading founders and CEOs. So take a moment to be a good friend and leave that review today. As always, thanks for being a part of our journey and for helping MedSider continue to grow and evolve. Your support is greatly appreciated. All right, enough talk about reviews. Stay tuned for another informative episode coming at you soon.