Dental technology has come a long way since you got braces back in 80s. Now with advanced dental 3D printing as an option, treatment for patients has grown faster and more reliable than ever. The possibilities of high resolution polymer 3d printing are truly endless, with companies fighting to dominate several areas, including digital dentistry. One such company is SprintRay, a 3D Printer manufacturer that has revolutionized conventional fabrication methods in dentistry. Faraz Abidi, Head of Software at SprintRay, discusses how they delivered the Moonray 3D printers to over a thousand dentist offices, putting the power of 3D printing directly into the hands of their customers.

SprintRay’s founders – Amir Mansouri and Hossein Bassir – were two PhDs out of University of Southern California who did original research on Additive Manufacturing, also known as 3D printing. Faraz Abidi started with Sprintray after meeting Amir Mansouri at USC’s on-campus research lab called Contour. After Sprintray had very successful launch on Kickstarter, Faraz joined the team to help them execute orders for the backers. Now SprintRay has become a runaway success, taking the 3D printing industry to a whole another level.

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We’ve got a great update on a company that is completely focused on 3D printing in the dental industry. We’ve talked about the dental industry a couple of times in past episodes and how 3D printing has been used to advance that industry. This company is taking it to a whole other level. We have Faraz Abidi from SprintRay. SprintRay is a DLP, so it’s a resin-based printer. Their printer is called the MoonRay because the two founders are PhDs from USC and they were doing this NASA-sponsored research project. They started a Kickstarter campaign. The interesting part of the story is that from that Kickstarter campaign, they found that one of the largest dental labs in the world participated in it. It led them on this path of exploring what is $143 billion dental industry. I thought this was interesting expansion on some of the stuff we’ve covered on dental before. We’ve talked about the Invisalign type model and things like that but we haven’t talked about the printers that are in it or how dentists are using it.

Technology, not only in the machines but in materials, has improved tremendously. There are many great takeaways from this interview. One of them is how taking a deep dive into a particular market helps you solve the specific needs of that market, if you’re not trying to be a 3D printer that’s trying to be all things to all people.

Listen to the podcast here:

Advanced Dental 3D Printing With Faraz Abidi

Faraz, thank you so much for joining us. I’m excited to talk about SprintRay because we don’t get to talk about much more than FFF printers often. It’s been a big conversation point here with some of the current work we’re doing with our product design clients. We’re interested how you got started with them.

Thanks for having me. To give you some background, we came out of a research lab at USC called Contour Crafting. It was a bunch of PhD students. I was an undergrad who was helping them with their research and we were focused on 3D printing to build houses. It’s an amazing lab. We had funding from NASA for 3D printing on the moon because you can’t bring materials up there. You’d have to use the materials that were available. We had US government grants for disaster relief. Everyone in that lab was extremely entrepreneurial-minded. Out of that lab, three startups came out of it. We launched a machine on Kickstarter, it was the original MoonRay. It was a DLP/SLA printer. We were super excited about this technology and we’re amazed at how much resolution you could get out of that price point for the desktop market.

What was your Kickstarter price?

We had a couple of different price points. Our early bird was $2,700, the final was around $3,500.

What was your feedback from there?

We learned something profound, which is that if you focus on creating a printer for the broad market, because this high resolution means you can support jewelry, dentistry, prototyping, character design, all of that stuff, there are a few markets that you’ll neglect. The main one that we found is dentistry which is sad because if you look at the impact that 3D printing can have, the fact that digital dentistry is in the next five years projected to be in the office of one third of all dentists, that’s millions of people who can be affected by dentistry. Based off of that, we decided to create a printer specifically for the dental market. That was our second machine, the MoonRay S. We made a number of design decisions to make a great machine for dentists.

Dental 3D Printing: When you make a digital machine for dentists, you want to make it as reliable and as smooth as possible.

We’re finding a lot more of this specializing in machinery that is focusing on saying, “We don’t need all this extra stuff that makes it general market. If you dial this in, it would work better in a particular industry niche. You’ve done that and you’ve learned that from your initial Kickstarter.

That was a huge lesson that we learned. One thing which is different with the other markets versus digital dentistry was we were fellow kins with prototypers and engineers because that was what we were doing the lab. We’re super techie. We get hands-on with the machine, we’ll tinker with it. If there are any issues, if there’s anything that we need to modify to get peak performance out of it, we’ll do that. The thing is with a dentist, that’s chair time that they don’t get to see a patient. When you make a digital machine for dentists, you want to make it as reliable and as smooth as possible. If they spend time tinkering with it, that’s however many thousands of dollars that they don’t get because it’s a patient that can’t see.

That’s our model as well. Even in the design side of things, we do a lot of that. Here is that reliability and being able to stay in the element of design and not be worrying about the prints and how they’re coming out. Knowing it’s going to happen and the machine is going to be running is important to our workflow as well. In pretty much every business, that is money.

For dentistry specifically, it’s very much a tool. It’s not a toy that you play with and you mess around with. We’ve created a product to reflect that.

Is the business totally focused on that? SprintRay has shifted into being a dentistry-modeled machine? Are you still addressing multiple niches?

We’re very much a dental company. That’s our focus. That’s what we’re committed to. That’s not to say that we don’t have printers which are used for other amazing things, but everything that we make is specifically for dentistry. One decision that we made that would support dentists is we use DLP as opposed to a laser SLA. For the high-resolution market, your two main options, if you’re using resin-based 3D printers, are SLA and DLP. SLA, the drawback to it is if you want to print one arch model, then it needs to trace it out with a path. Let’s say that’s an hour. If you need to print ten arch models, that takes ten hours because the laser now has traced ten times as much area. DLP is different because it uses projector. One shot, it projects the entire layer. If you want to print one arch model, it takes the same amount of time to put in ten arch models. That allows dentists to print twenty arches in a single day.

I didn’t realize that about SLA printers. I thought that they’re curing one layer at a time and that amount of time takes the same no matter how much of the build plate surface you’re curing. It seems with those two different technologies, that’s not the case.

The SLA is also a bit more complicated. It involves more motors and moving parts. DLP, also, it’s a single projector and a mirror and it will project to whatever area of the build platform it needs. That also increases the reliability.

I see why you’ve chosen that. One of the things that we do here when we review printers and products is we think about its end use. For us, there are many printers where most people will be like, “This is terrible. It doesn’t work or whatever.” It doesn’t work for a certain industry niche, but we could see ones that it would work with if you needed speed, if you needed detail, or if you needed color. Whatever those might be, there are areas by which the printers would rise to the being of choice rather than looking at them from that generalized platform as well.

One thing which will drive the adoption of 3D printing in dentistry forward is in addition to creating great printers which fit the market, patients are going to demand it. When I was a kid, I got braces and I still remember how uncomfortable of an experience that was. What they had to do was they started with an impression. 90% of serious dental work or basically anything past the cavity requires starting with an impression. They take this tray and fill it up with this material called alginate, a fastening polymer. I specifically remember them holding this big thing in my mouth, pushing it there. It was hard to breathe. Some of it was dropping into my throat so I’m gagging. I don’t want to rehash any old wounds, but it was traumatic for me. It turns out that that is no longer necessary.

Dental 3D Printing: In addition to creating great printers which fit the market, patients are going to demand it.

Now, dentists are using 3D scanners and this is where digital dentistry comes into the forefront. They use the scanner. It’s basically the tip. The scanning point is about the size of a Sharpie. It’s like any other dental tool, it will go in there and it will scan your mouth. The thing with alginate impressions is an addition to being incredibly uncomfortable, they have about a 90% success rate, which is good. That means 10%of the time you have to go back in and do another one before you can get your braces or whatever appliance you need fitted. With digital dentistry, they can scan your mouth, they look on the screen, and they can see the entire tooth model from there. If there are any errors which are missing, they just go back in there, they clean it up, and you’re good to go.

With this dental appliance that dentists will be 3D printing locally in their offices, is it primarily Orthodontry braces like the Invisalign model and not having to send out and have them come back? What other types of applications are there with the resin-based material?

This has been driven by the advent of materials for SLA specifically. Before, five years ago, the answer was not that much. Now there are FDA approved materials which only worked for SLA and DLP, which is one reason why FDM is not on the table for this ambition to the resolution. They offer pretty much everything. There are dentures which are being printed. The teeth and the gingiva are both completely printed. Crowns are being printed. Night guards were being printed. I would say the two biggest uses of our printer are one, surgical guides and two, aligners. I didn’t know about this before I entered the industry because I never needed a dental implant, but if you’re missing a tooth and you need to get an implant, you have two options.

One of them is of them is guided surgery, the other one is unguided surgery. Guided surgery is quite a bit more expensive but if you can afford it, it is very much worth it. What the dentist needs to do is they take the drill and they find the area on the gum which is perfect for placing the titanium screw and they drill into it. If you’re doing this unguided, that’s like trying to find a stud without stud finder. It’s very dangerous. The other option was guided surgery. Historically, that was significantly more expensive. First, they have to take an impression and they have to send it out to a lab. The lab will fabricate the surgical guide. That costs them $300 a pop and it takes several days. Finally, they get it back and then they can drill. They can use a surgical guide which has a sleeve where it just drills straight into the sleeve. Because of 3D printing, guided surgery is cheaper than unguided surgery for digital dentists. All you need to do is scan them out. They can print out surgical guide for about $3 worth of materials. Now it’s faster, so the dentist can see more patients if they’re doing guided surgery and because it’s so cheap, it ends up saving them money and saving the customer money.

Polymer technology must have come a long way because I’ve never heard of using 3D printed polymer as a permanent dental material. I’ve experienced it in terms of a temporary crown while a conventional was being made and things like that. I’m interested in learning a little bit about that as well. What can you share with us about that?

As far as for permanent fixtures, the main use of 3D printing today and in two years will definitely change as materials become more advanced and more tested. The main usage is as a mold for other parts. The big one is the liners. Back when I had to get braces, I remember seeing a big Invisalign poster and we asked the dentist about it because it seemed a lot more convenient. It was way out of our price range, we couldn’t afford it. Today, having clear aligner therapy because of 3D printing is totally available for the mass market.

They can redo and scan based on the movement of your mouth and it’s more accurate.

That’s exactly right. What they do is they’ll scan your mouth. They’ll have the dental model which is produced. They have two options. A dentist can send this out to a company who will take the scan and come up with twelve, twenty, or 30 different intermediate steps for what the teeth should look like. They’ll send this back to the dentist and the dentist will 3D print this. They’ll use something called a vacuum forming machine which will basically push and heat up plastic so that it will fit right onto the dental model which they’ve printed. That can go straight into a patient’s mouth. FDA-approved, ready to go, everything. That will save half the cost of traditional clear aligner therapy. The other option is if a dentist is experienced with this is they can take the scan and themselves construct the twelve, twenty, or 30 steps for the teeth. In this case, the cost for them is going to be $25 worth of materials.

They’re not 3D printing the actual appliance that’s going to be used in your mouth. They’re 3D printing a positive that then their vacuum forming our molding the other material over.

I would say largely it’s used as an intermediate step for creating onto other dental appliances. It’s also used as temporaries. There are some good materials which can go in the mouth for a couple of days while the dentist’s lab or the dentist’s in-house-mill is fabricating it. That costs a lot more mill time. Mills take a lot longer. The cost material is more so on, so forth. We’ve had a new material out, which can both 3D print the denture gingiva and the denture tooth model. It’s a new material but FDA-wise it’s cleared for a year of use. We’ll see how our clinicians use that. It’s a new frontier.

Are you guys at SprintRay involved in the development of the materials not just the machine?

Very much so. We’re working with clinicians on a daily basis to see what needs they have. I would say our main competition is the mill versus the 3D printer. Mills are large $100,000 machines, which most dentists don’t even have. They have them in the lab. Anything which comes from the lab to in-house saves so much money for dentists. More importantly, it saves turnaround time for patients. With digital dentistry you can do something called chair side dentistry, where while the patient is still in the chair you can 3D print the surgical guide and you can get started.

Dental 3D Printing: Anything which comes from the lab to in-house saves so much money for dentists.

You think of a dentist and them not being very technical, but dentists are. There are always measurements. I remember our orthodontist doing and specifying all the movements that he expected to make, when the right time to take impressions were and all of those things. They’re a lot more technical than we realized and turning them into digital dentist is not as far reach as we think it is, like it might be in other types of medical fields.

A lot of dentists today are some of the most technically savvy and innovative people working. The first batch of 3D printers that came out for the desktop market didn’t have any resources, didn’t have any guides, didn’t have any knowledge-base for dentists to use. The first generation of digital dentists were basically pioneers in this field. I want to give a big shout out to one dentist in particular, his name is Baron Grutter. What he did was he bought an early printer and he learned how to use it. Now he teaches classes to other dentists of how you can use digital in your workflow. He makes all these great YouTube videos, dozens of them from everything to how do you remove models from a build platform, how do you clean up bad scans in Meshmixer, how do you place models in your software so that you can print them out optimally. He puts all this on YouTube for free.

A lot of dentists are taking the millennial mindset of, “Let’s use the internet, let’s share all of that information and see if we can push the industry forward.” Because of these guys, dentistry in the next three to five years are going to be in the office as of 30% of dentists and you have to give credit to people like Baron who are pushing it forward.

I also want to make sure we give enough attention to the scanners involved in this. These scanners must be incredibly precise and capable of creating a lot of detail. Scanning, at least from our perspective in the consumer desktop world, is difficult to work with. I understand that there are price barriers and reasons why that’s the case. These must be some incredible scanners and development of that technology must have been a critical component of being able to provide this entire delivery system for dentists.

Digital scanners that are used in the dental practice have a micron resolution of about 30. I’ve used desktop scanners for my own engineering and it doesn’t come close to that. Teeth are white and reflective, which if you’re using desktop scanners, you know what a pain that is to deal with.

On low light, because you’re projecting light in but they’re low light otherwise.

Take every challenge you can think of and scanning the mouth has that. Yet digital scanning for dentistry is on par with impressions. I was reading a couple of clinical studies about this and the clinical acceptance rate is virtually identical. Aligners which you created using scanning technology opposed to traditional impressions are better according to the orthodontist.

The thing is we’re all sensitive. As a parent, I’m sensitive to the idea of having X-rays done. To not have to have X-rays to have a scan, I feel a lot more comfortable with that, especially in our children. That’s probably also driving factor from a consumer acceptance or a route for them as well. You keep using the term digital dentist. I want a directory of digital dentist. I want to know who a digital dentist is. I want to be able to make sure that I’m taking my kids to a digital dentist. I would love for you guys to put that on your site.

We definitely will. We work with a lot of them. There are some great ones in the LA area, we correspond to them daily basis. Baron Grutter, he’s a Beta tester for our software and we run all of our stuff by him to see what dentists need, what is missing in the digital dentist workflow that we can provide.

The software for what you do with that scan also must be advanced. That’s also where a lot of workflow breaks down for people that are learning how to use these digital scanners. You’re scanning the interior of someone’s mouth, their teeth. You’re not scanning a completely closed object in terms of the scan that’s created, which must need to become a completely closed object in order to then print it.

When you scan the tooth, it comes out as a shell. It can also have some islands and some artifacts, which need to be cleaned up. The funny thing is most dentists’ entry point for this is Meshmixer because it’s free, it’s powerful, and there are a lot of resources.

We found somewhat surprising how great Meshmixer is for it being free. It’s been one of those software that it’s surprising the amount of industries or different industries that are utilizing it. It must be because of that free entry. I can’t imagine why you thought, “I’ll pick it up. It’s free. I might as well check it out,” and then found it useful.

Credit goes to the pioneering digital dentist who is teaching others how to use it. If you look at Meshmixer YouTube tutorials, Baron has some great videos on, “Now you have a scan. How do you make sure it’s got a flat base so it will adhere to a print platform? How do you clean the islands? How do you extend the model so that it can be printed in this orientation? How do you print models flat, so you can fit on twenty full arches as opposed to five of them if they’re printed flat and make them vertical?” Because it’s free, a lot of digital dentists have used that as their tool of choice to evangelize for the product.

Dental 3D Printing: Being able to do it the same day improves the workflow so much that the extra labor time for cleaning up an aligner is offset by these other benefits.

Digital dentists are utilizing all these new tools and this workflow. Obviously, machines are making things but there’s a little bit of machine maintenance. Let’s say you’re thermoforming this material, you’ve got to have that material, put it in the machine. I imagine after you thermoform it, it has to be trimmed and the edges deburred and things like that. There are things that the technicians at a local level must have to be doing, but it seems that what you’re reporting, and I’d like you to correct me if I’m wrong, is that the labor and time to do that is worth it for them. It seems to be an efficient use of their time otherwise they wouldn’t do it.

A lot of dentists train their assistants in taking the vacuum-formed aligners, cutting them and cleaning them. Once you bring everything in-house, the cost savings are enormous. Rather than taking a traditional impression and sending it off to a lab, being able to do it the same day improves the workflow so much that the extra labor time for cleaning up an aligner is offset by these other benefits.

I have to imagine that for them, they do feel it probably happens a lot, that it used to come back from the lab and it wasn’t right. It happens all the time. We hear that when we have eyeglasses. The same problem is like, “I don’t’ understand why there are numbers, there’s data and they still come back wrong and they don’t fit right,” and there’s an issue there. It’s got to be the same thing from the dentist and the labs. They were sending things in and they know the nuances of someone’s mouth and they’re the expert in dentistry. It’s not just a technician handling one part of a process in a lab, it’s them being able to utilize that and customize it for their client, which is what they want at the end of the day anyway. It’s got to feel like they’re much more hands on and much more able to address those things so got to be a higher success rate.

Furthermore, when I had braces, I had to get a retainer afterwards and I lost it once. My dentist charged me $300 to replace the retainer. I can’t blame him for it because looking at the numbers now, it’s about $250 from the lab and he wanted to make a little bit of money. Now, digital dentists oftentimes will do it for free because all it costs is $3 worth of material. They’ll print it out for you again.

Which makes you want to come back to them again. Parents are feeling somewhat nickeled and dimed as it is in the orthodonture world. What’s next for SprintRay? Are you going to bring a little more ecosystem in and start to nurture and grow digital dentistry?

As a software guy, this is the point where I get to show off a little bit about what we’re working on. Having spoken to commissions, dentists, and dental labs, we’ve learned a lot about what they need. One thing that is important to dentists is to track their expenses. Come tax season, you want to file, “I’ve spent this much money on a resin.” We’re working on a feature that will track the resin usage and create a CSV that they can export and when they need to file their taxes, it’s going to be available for them. We think that a lot of small tweaks to benefit the workflow of dentistry can be done in software. It can be done in materials. There are other reliability improvements and performance tweaks that we can make in hardware that we think will change the experience for dentists.

You’re thinking about it from the business model of a dentist. How can they be efficient? How can they recoup their costs? How can they write the off their costs? That’s great because we don’t see that. This is something we try to address early on when we were working on, like how do we price a 3D print model? There are hours of design work involved and the output, the plastic, like you mentioned, it’s pennies at the end of the day. Does that matter? Yes, I can track how much I purchased over time but I have no idea as how much I used. You look at that and your business model of being able to be accurate about it starts to fall apart. When you do that, it makes it hard to make a business case for bringing something in-house when you have too many intangibles.

Our goal with digital dentistry for dentists is to practice dentistry. As far as dealing with 3D printing and spending time cleaning up models and making sure that the printer will take that out of their hands. The printer will do what you ask it to and the rest is up to you as a dentist.

Advanced Dental 3D Printing With Faraz Abidi Final Thoughts

There are many things that came to mind as we’re interviewing Faraz and I’m having flashbacks as well to my experience with braces. Just to think how 3D printing has transformed that industry in general. The idea that using the computer, even forget 3D printing for a moment, but using the computer to create the twelve plus steps of movement of your teeth, orthodontists did not do that back in the ‘80s when I had braces. You had all the wires and all they were doing was manipulating the wires and tightening them to move your teeth. It was not a precise thing like it is today. It was more of a craft and an art. Yes, there were technical aspects to it, but they made their manipulations to your braces to try to move your teeth where they wanted it to go. No wonder you had to go visit them often so they could keep checking it and make more adjustments. Now, you can predetermine all different steps it’s going to take to move your teeth from where they are to where they want them to go.

Dental 3D Printing: The printer will do what you ask it to and the rest is up to you as a dentist.

You have to think about it from a dentist’s and a child’s mouth perspective. We’re growing. Everything’s growing in there and they have the ability to be flexible. Even if you did plan out the twelve steps, they can turn out to be wrong. When you’re in control of that and it didn’t come from a lab, you now have the ability to flex because some growth thing happened or a tooth got lost that shouldn’t have. You don’t have to trash all of that, start again, do your impressions, start the whole process all over and spend all that money. You are able to flex and move that one system within the twelve steps that you are making. It gives dentists a lot more control over that process they can still practice the art of dentistry, the art part of it, being able to respond what’s going on in someone’s mouth.

I don’t know why but it’s somehow very surprising to me how advanced the dental industry is. I guess it’s because every single person on earth has teeth and everybody needs to see the dentist so maybe it’s a big market and that’s worth spending money on. I’m thinking back to more than ten years ago. I’ve had issues with a particular tooth since I was fourteen years old. I cracked it on a popcorn kernel and I had a root canal, then I had a crown, and then I ended up losing the tooth and I had a bridge. Otherwise I have beautiful teeth, I’ve had no problem, but this one tooth has been a thorn in my side for decades.

About 2006 or 2007, I had another problem with it. Our local dentist here in Southern California was on the forefront of digital dentistry and it wasn’t involving 3D printing at that time, but it did involve CNC machining in the dental office. They were using scanning technology at that time to scan my tooth and to make a crown. Before they destroyed a tooth, they need a crown. They scanned it so they knew the shape and everything of your crown. If there was any other tooth missing, they had these models in the computer that they were able to then combine all the typical crown shapes of teeth. They could find one that most closely matched what your tooth crown was and they added that stock model with the scan of your tooth and then they would CNC machine a crown out of this porcelain material. I was fascinated with it and this is way before 3D printing. I thought that was the rocket science. These guys, they are taking it to a whole new level and solving a lot of problems. It does ultimately make it easier for those of us that have to sit in the chair or have to go back for repeated visits to accomplish things. The results are probably a lot better in terms of the end result and also the amount of time needed to spend there and the level of comfort or discomfort as the case may be.

This idea of digital dentistry as being a cottage industry within an industry, that’s an interesting concept. We’re growing much more self-sufficient and dentists who are much more in control of the process. I remember I went to Speaking Empire with a guy who had multiple dentistry offices and grown it up. Vince is his name and Vince was a proponent of how dentistry was a glorified job even if you owned your own practice because you were paying rent to someone, you were constantly using outside labs, and everything was contracted. At the end of the day, it was the same model for every dentist. It was a matter of how good you were at keeping your clients, how happy were they with you, and how much did they refer you or how much you spend on marketing. That was your differentiator and it became this thing where you ended up with not a great retirement out of it. He wanted to change that model by focusing on being able to own your facility, being able to own your process, being able to own your equipment and do all of that rather than leasing everything.

The real estate play was the biggest financial opportunity in this model. I can see this digital dentistry being of benefit as well because you’re talking about the number of patients you could push through, the speed with which you can service them, how effective they are, how if someone’s moving faster through the process, great. You can move them up to the next level quicker. It doesn’t have to be such a prescribed methodology because it’s not dependent on a lab. It’s dependent on you and you’re in control of that as a dentist. It does change the effectiveness of the industry and building a good business.

Dental 3D Printing: You can accomplish more if you narrow in on a market and then you can better serve that market and come up with more innovations in the technology.

It’s also another important case study in the 3D printing industry to show how to make advancements in a market. You’ve got to focus on that market. You can’t be trying to be all things to all people. I think there are too many companies out there that are trying to have a 3D printer. “What’s your 3D print good for? It’s good for everything. We could do this, we could do that.” You can accomplish more if you narrow in on a market and then you can better serve that market and come up with more innovations in the technology.

That is the case and in this particular, as Faraz pointed out, they have this pioneering dentist who helped change things for them. He helped do these hard things like figure out what the workflow should be and the tools you need to know and the Meshmixer, but not everything else. These are the things that start to help you. If you’re lucky enough to be a company like SprintRay who has that pioneering client, you should be working closely with them. When you do that, they’re going to be giving you this valuable information and insight into the workflow, into what’s important, so that you don’t go off on what you think is important as the tech side of it and what software it should be and what everyone else has. No, you think about what is essential to the process and adding value and you don’t add all the bells and whistles that that complicate things. That’s a much better model for success.

I can see dental practices being much more profitable and providing a better customer experience and all that is good. I guess the people it’s bad for are the older school labs that used to have it sent out to them. They better get themselves in the digital world for those two-thirds of dentists who won’t do it themselves. Thanks so much for listening. We’ll be back next time. This has been Tom and Tracy on the WTFFF 3D Printing Podcast.

About Faraz Abidi

Faraz Abidi is the Head of Software at SprintRay. He is started with Sprintray after meeting Amir Mansouri at USC’s on-campus research lab called Contour. After Sprintray had very successful launch on Kickstarter, Faraz joined the team to help them execute orders for the backers. Since then, he has helped the team deliver the Moonray 3D printers to over 1000 dentist offices.

SprintRay is a 3D Printer manufacturer focused on digital dentistry. Our products empower dentists to offer the fastest and the most reliable treatment for their patients.

Our vision is to put the power 3D Printing into the hands of our customers, and through this, we can revolutionize conventional fabrication methods in dentistry.

We, the founders (Amir Mansouri and Hossein Bassir), were two PhDs out of University of Southern California who were doing original research on Additive Manufacturing aka 3D printing. We have been fascinated with the possibilities of high resolution polymer 3d printing and were passionate to enable more people with it.

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