Surrey and King’s AI spinout raises £1.7m to tackle above 50 per cent dental diagnostic error rates
With diagnostic error rates in dental X-ray interpretation exceeding 50 per cent, BeCertain – a UK-born spinout – has raised £1.7 million to deploy AI technology that gives clinicians a calibrated measure of the system's certainty alongside each finding, rather than make decisions based on conclusions they have to take on trust.
BeCertain, a spinout from the University of Surrey and King’s College London, has secured £1.7 million in a pre-seed investment round led by specialist AI venture capital firm Sure Valley Ventures (SVV), with further support from Innovate UK’s Investor Partnership Growth Catalyst programme. The funding will be used to advance the technology and build out BeCertain’s commercial operation as it scales.
Around 20 million intraoral X-rays are taken in the UK every year, and clinicians work under intense pressure to interpret them quickly and accurately. But the same X-ray can yield different conclusions depending on which clinician reviews it, and diagnostic error rates for common conditions exceed 50 per cent. Diseases that go undetected delay treatment, harm patients and expose practices to avoid legal and financial risk.
Every missed diagnosis represents a missed opportunity for a patient. The hard part in clinical AI isn’t detection, it’s trust. That’s what we’ve built for – a system that tells clinicians how confident it is rather than issuing a black-box verdict, that keeps patient data protected, and that we evaluate at scale. Our system helps identify a broad range of common conditions, including tooth decay, bone loss, infections and restoration defects. It integrates easily with dental imaging systems that dentists already use.Dr Yunpeng Li, CEO and co-founder of BeCertain
BeCertain is building the trust layer for dental AI, with technology trained on NHS-grade data that brings accuracy and consistency to every diagnosis. What stood out was the founders’ rare combination of research expertise and frontline clinical knowledge and their drive to bring this technology into everyday dental practice.Barry Downes, managing partner at SVV
Rather than issuing a binary verdict, BeCertain’s system tells clinicians how certain the AI is in each finding. This uncertainty-aware AI generates calibrated confidence scores alongside each assessment, so a dentist reviewing a complex or ambiguous image can see not just what the system thinks it has found but the weight it places on that finding.
The software detects a range of common conditions from 2D intraoral X-rays, including tooth decay, bone loss, infections and restoration defects. It integrates with dental imaging systems that practices already use, and data privacy is built into its architecture from the outset. The underlying technology was trained on NHS-grade data.
The technology behind BeCertain traces its origins to research led at the University of Surrey, where Dr Li was a faculty member before moving to King’s.
The company joined King’s MedTech Venture Builder programme in 2025, a 12-month programme hosted by the London Institute for Healthcare Engineering designed to accelerate clinical technologies towards investment readiness. It has also received support through Innovate UK’s ICURe programme, the Pioneer Group’s Launch Programme and a Royal Academy of Engineering Enterprise Fellowship.
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