Brontes Technologies, Inc. was a

startup company A startup or start-up is a company or project undertaken by an entrepreneur to seek, develop, and validate a scalable business model. While entrepreneurship refers to all new businesses, including self-employment and businesses that never intend t ...

that produced a digital dental impression system brought to market by 3M as The Lava Chairside Oral Scanner C.O.S. The Lava C.O.S. provides a powerful connection and improved productivity for a doctor and their dental lab thereby enabling the needed input to mass customized lab production in the dental market. Brontes Technologies, Inc. was born out of the research of

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

lecturer Janos Rohaly (Chief Scientist), professor Douglas Hart, and two graduate students from the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering, Federico Frigerio and Sheng Tan. After three years of research, the inventing team received a grant from

Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation The MIT School of Engineering (SoE) is one of the five schools of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. SoE has eight academic departments and two interdisciplinary institutes. The School gra ...

at MIT to shift the focus of its work toward commercial opportunities. In Autumn 2002, the inventing team recruited co-founders Eric Paley as CEO and Micah Rosenbloom as COO, both Harvard Business School students, to evaluate the commercial potential of the technology, develop a business plan and raise capital. In May 2003, the combined team was selected as the runner-up in the MIT 50K and

Harvard Business School Harvard Business School (HBS) is the graduate business school of Harvard University, a private research university in Boston, Massachusetts. It is consistently ranked among the top business schools in the world and offers a large full-time MBA p ...

Business Plan Competitions. Brontes Technologies was incorporated in June 2003 and identified the dental market as its business focus on the summer of 2003. The company was funded in 2004 by

David Frankel David Frankel (born April 2, 1959) is an American filmmaker. Most known as the director of 2006 film, '' The Devil Wears Prada'', he is an executive producer and the director of the first and fourth episodes of the Netflix miniseries ''Inventing ...

, Flybridge Capital,

Charles River Ventures Charles River Ventures (CRV) is a venture capital firm focused on early-stage investments in technology. The firm was founded in 1970 to commercialize research that came out of MIT. Its name comes from the Charles River. History The firm has rai ...

, and

Bain Capital Ventures Bain Capital Ventures LLC is the venture capital division within Bain Capital, which has approximately $160 billion of assets under management worldwide. The firm's early-stage investments have included Attentive, Bloomreach, Clari, Docusign, Fl ...

. Brontes Technologies innovated 3D-In-Motion technology which allowed the dentist to scan the inside of the mouth by moving an instrument above the teeth and capturing accurate high resolution data in real-time. In October 2006, Brontes Technologies was acquired by 3M Company for $95 million and the product was launched to the dental market in 2007.

References

{{Reflist Dental companies of the United States Technology companies established in 2003 Health care companies based in Massachusetts Medical technology companies of the United States

See also

References