Toothbrush innovation
What if you could brush every tooth at once and emerge from the cavity car wash with perfectly clean teeth in 20 seconds?
One of the ideas I explored while at Entrepreneur First in 2024 was building a diagnostic U-shaped toothbrush that could let you brush your teeth in 80% less time and simultaneously detect gum disease.
Nearly half of American adults are affected by gum disease, and who wouldn’t love to save 10 hours per year that is currently spent waving a stick in front your face?
The two largest two direct-to-consumer clear aligner companies both shut down12 within a year of each other, and the main reason for that was backlash caused by lackluster eligibility screening stemming from high OpEx due to a dependency on in-person clinics.
If the humble toothbrush becomes the entry point for safe and standardised oral health screening, then the problem which has now killed two billion-dollar companies is solved.
U-shaped toothbrushes had been around for nearly a decade, but early silicon versions were about as useful as not brushing your teeth at all. Recent entrants scrambled to distance themselves from these early versions. Feno and Willo are the two fastest-moving startups in the space right now.
Feno is an industrial-looking $300 diagnostic toothbrush that announced $7M in funding in September 2024, and launched just in time for Christmas.
Willo is a German company with $17M in funding founded all the way back in 2014 who’ve recently relaunched following a false start in 2021. Their product targets kids and uses a reservoir to circulate cleaning fluid.
Despite not being a U-shaped toothbrush, I must give an honorable mention to Suri - we spoke to a lot of people who owned one, and they pretty much all loved it. It’s a very unassuming product to look at, but the fit amongst people concerned by how “dirty” (both literally and morally) mainstream electric toothbrushes were was evident.
To cut a long story short, the reason we didn’t go ahead is a combination of the tech not quite being ready yet, learning a large number of customer interviews that individuals motivated to change their brushing habits are mostly poor adherents, and Feno being just too far ahead on R&D to compete for the relatively small biohacking market.
My favorite discovery of the whole experience was without a doubt the bizarre Blizzbrush whose eclectic founder angrily responds to negative comments on Trustpilot and Reddit. Despite looking totally bizarre, it seems to actually work quite well from a mechanical perspective. I’ll leave the question of trapped bacteria and hygeine up to you.
List of toothbrush startups
| Company | Type | Funding Amount (2024) | Funding Type | Status (2024) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Feno | U Shape (electric) | $7,000,000 | Venture capital | Beta testing |
| Autobrush | U Shape (electric) | - | - | Operational |
| Willo | U Shape (electric) | $17,500,000 | Venture capital | Operational |
| Amabrush | U Shape (electric) | $3,500,000 | Kickstarter | Failed - Never shipped |
| Y-Brush | U Shape (electric) | $6,000,000 | Kickstarter, Venture capital | Operational |
| Unobrush | U Shape (electric) | $1,000,000 | Kickstarter | Failed - Bad product |
| Suri | I Shape (electric) | $10,000,000 | Bootstrapped, Venture capital | Operational + revenue >$10M |
| Poma | I Shape (electric) | $400,000 | Kickstarter | Operational |
| Goby | I Shape (electric) | $2,000,000 | Venture capital | Failed - Bad business model |
| Be. | I Shape (electric) | $400,000 | Kickstarter | Failed - Never shipped |
| Bruush | I Shape (electric) | - | - | Failed - Bad business model |
| Symplbrush | U Shape (electric) | - | - | Operational |
| Blizzbrush | Manual | $15,000 | Kickstarter | Operational |