Imagen Dental Partners and Your Practice: What Owners Should Know in 2026

Here is a strange thing about the approach sitting in front of you.

You can drive past a hundred of this buyer’s practices and never once see its name.

Not on a sign. Not on a scrub top.

Not on the appointment card. Every practice keeps the name it had before.

So the usual homework does not work. You cannot count storefronts, because there are none to count.

What you can do is what almost nobody does, which is look at the paperwork. It turns out to be unusually revealing.

Key takeaways

• Imagen Dental Partners is a genuine buyer of existing practices, affiliating independent general practices continuously from 2020 through mid-2026, with no pause and no contraction.
• It is doctor-led rather than private-equity-owned, which is rare at this scale and changes how the capital behind an offer actually works.
• The equity sits at practice level, not only in one pooled parent. Public filings show a separate Arizona entity created for each affiliation.
• There is a real technology entry requirement. Chairside CAD/CAM and cone-beam imaging, in place or agreed to on joining. This is the screen most owners never see coming.
• Your practice name survives. The Imagen name appears in the legal structure, not on your door.

Does Imagen Dental Partners buy dental practices? Yes, and it is doing so now. Imagen affiliates existing independent practices under a doctor-led partnership model, supporting more than 120 doctor-owned practices across 17 states from its Scottsdale, Arizona base.

Affiliating dentists hold equity rather than fully exiting.

Who Imagen Dental Partners actually is

Founded in 2020 and headquartered in Scottsdale, Arizona. The parent, Imagen Dental Partners, LLC, is a Delaware limited liability company, and its first securities filing records a sale in July of that year.

Its executive officers on those filings are Rezwan Manji, chief executive, and co-founder Michael Augins. The wider leadership includes a president and chief financial officer, a chief operating officer and a chief clinical officer.

Today Imagen supports more than 120 doctor-owned practices across 17 states.

Two labels need defining before we go further, because the difference between them is the whole article.

A DSO is a dental support organization. The management company owns the non-clinical side of a practice and handles everything outside the operatory, while a licensed dentist retains ownership of the clinical entity.

That structure is not a marketing preference. Most states restrict who may own or control a dental practice under the corporate practice of dentistry doctrine, and the support-organization model exists to operate inside those rules.

A DPO is a dental partnership organization. The affiliating dentist stays on as a meaningful owner rather than becoming an employee, and the local practice name is generally kept rather than converted to a house banner.

Imagen describes itself firmly in the second category, and describes itself as doctor-led rather than owned by a financial sponsor.

Does Imagen buy existing practices, or build new ones?

Buys. Continuously, and at a steady pace rather than in bursts.

Worth stating plainly, because two of the three largest DSOs in the country do the opposite. Aspen Dental and PDS Health grow primarily by opening new offices.

Of the three largest, only Heartland Dental is substantially acquisition-led.

An owner who assumes the biggest names are all bidding for existing practices is working from a false map.

Imagen is not on that map at all, which is the point. Recent affiliations, each with a dated announcement of its own:

Pineview Aesthetic & Family Dentistry in Bellevue, Washington, led by Dr. Gannon Stahl, announced 15 June 2026. Cosmetic Smiles in Houston, led by Dr.

Leticia Perezous, in the same month. Floss General + Cosmetic Dentistry in Seattle, led by Dr. Nassim Pietsch, announced 23 July 2026.

Earlier in the year it added Smile Crafters, and Heiden Family Dental in Sunnyside, Washington. Before that, Highgrove Dental Care in St.

Paul, Minnesota, with Dr. Jadilyn Grittner and Dr.

John Grittner.

That is five states in a single trailing year, and the pattern runs unbroken back to 2020.

Where the equity actually sits, and why the filings matter

This is where Imagen departs from almost every other buyer an owner will meet, and it is visible in public records rather than in a pitch deck.

Search the SEC’s filing database for the word “Imagen” and you do not find one company. You find roughly 124 of them.

Each carries the same shape of name: Imagen [Practice Name] Support Services, LLC. Each is an Arizona entity.

Each was formed in the year its practice affiliated. Each filed its own exempt-offering notice naming Imagen Dental Partners, LLC as a related person.

Read that structure slowly, because it tells you something a brochure will not.

An affiliation here is not one dentist being folded into a single national pool. It creates a purpose-built entity that exists only for that practice, and the affiliating dentist holds units in it.

Imagen’s own description of the arrangement, from its launch materials, sets out three streams: payment for the dentistry the dentist produces, a share of that practice’s profitability, and a share of the wider organization’s profits.

So there are two layers, not one. The practice layer you still influence directly.

The community layer you do not.

That distinction is the single most useful question to take into a conversation with any partnership buyer. Which layer is my money in, and in what proportion?

I am not going to tell you whether the two-layer version is better than the one-layer version. It depends entirely on how much you want your own operating performance to still matter after closing.

An owner who intends to keep producing at full pace for another decade will feel very differently about that than one planning to slow down in eighteen months.

What I will say is that owners consistently underestimate how much the answer changes their outcome. It is not a detail.

It is the deal.

The technology requirement is the real entry test

Here is the screen nobody warns owners about.

Imagen requires partner practices to use chairside CAD/CAM and cone-beam imaging, or to commit to putting both in on joining. Trade coverage of its launch stated it directly, and it has been part of the model since the beginning.

Most buyers ask about your collections, your hygiene department and your lease. This one also asks what is in your operatory.

That is a genuine filter, and it cuts both ways for a seller.

If you already scan and mill, you are the profile this organization is built around. If you do not, you are being asked to make a clinical decision and a capital decision in the same week you are making an exit decision.

Those three run on very different clocks. They should not be collapsed into one meeting.

The arithmetic that actually matters here

Forget the purchase price for a moment. Let me walk the operating side, because that is what this buyer is really buying.

Take a general practice seating around forty crown units a month. The lab bill on a conventional crown runs somewhere between $120 and $200 depending on material and lab, so call it $6,400 a month leaving the practice as an outside cost.

Now move that chairside. The lab invoice largely disappears and is replaced by a block cost of roughly $25 to $30 a unit, plus the mill’s consumables and maintenance.

On forty units, that is somewhere in the region of $4,500 a month back in the practice. Say $54,000 a year, before anything else changes.

Then there is the part owners forget. Seat time.

A conventional crown is two appointments, a temporary, a lab turnaround and a patient who has to come back. Same-day is one longer appointment and no temp.

You free a column in the schedule without adding a chair.

In the practices I have watched make this change properly, the schedule benefit was worth more than the lab saving. Not always.

But often.

Now the other side of the ledger, honestly. A scanner-and-mill setup plus a cone-beam unit is a serious capital commitment, commonly six figures all in.

There is a learning curve measured in months, not weeks. Early units take longer and some get remade.

And a practice that buys the kit three months before closing has spent the money and captured none of the benefit. The buyer gets the improved practice.

You get the invoice.

So the sequencing question is real. It also has a clean answer.

If you are going digital because it makes you a better dentist, do it now and let it season for two years. If you are going digital because a buyer asked you to, it belongs in the negotiation, not on your credit line.

One owner’s version of that decision

A prosthodontically minded general dentist in the Pacific Northwest, six operatories, one hygienist short, told me she had been quoted for a scanner twice and walked away both times.

Then an approach arrived that made the equipment a condition rather than an option.

Suddenly the quote she had been ignoring for two years had to be priced against a transaction she had not agreed to, on a timetable somebody else had set.

We separated the two questions on a legal pad. Left column: does this make the dentistry better.

Right column: does this make the sale better.

The left column filled up fast. Fewer remakes.

No gag-reflex impressions on the anxious cases. Predictable margins on the anterior work she actually enjoyed.

The right column had one honest entry, which was that a scanned, milled, cone-beam-planned practice reads differently in diligence than a practice with a film processor and a wall of study models.

She bought the scanner. She did not sell that year.

Eighteen months later the digital workflow was routine, the remake rate had halved, and the conversation with buyers was a completely different conversation, because she was no longer negotiating from inside somebody else’s deadline.

That is the sequencing point, made concrete. Buy the technology for your dentistry.

Let it show up in the numbers. Then sell.

What kind of practice Imagen looks for

No published revenue threshold, no minimum patient count, no stated geographic screen. Very few buyers publish those, and the ones that do tend to move them anyway.

The footprint tells you more. Seventeen states, weighted toward Arizona, Texas, Washington, the upper Midwest and the Southeast, with recent activity clustering noticeably in the Pacific Northwest.

The clinical profile is the clearer signal. Technology-forward general practices, with cosmetic and restorative depth, run by dentists who want to keep practicing at a high level rather than wind down.

Its education partnerships point the same way. Imagen provides mentoring and continuing education through Spear Education and CDOCS, both of which sit squarely in the advanced-restorative and chairside-digital world.

Underneath all of it is the test every buyer applies, whatever they say. Transferability.

A practice where patients come for the practice survives the owner’s departure. One where they come only for you is harder to underwrite, and every buyer prices that difference.

What an offer typically contains

Imagen does not publish a price sheet, and neither does any other organization in this market. What a buyer pays depends on the practice, the geography, their current appetite, their capital position, and above all on who else is bidding.

Any source quoting you a specific multiple for a named buyer is generalizing from a handful of deals it half-remembers.

What holds broadly across the buyer pool, rather than for any one organization:

Cash at close is typically a portion of the headline figure, not all of it. Rollover equity means keeping a slice of ownership in the buyer’s company instead of taking all cash. It usually makes up part of the balance.

In a partnership model it is a larger part by design.

An earnout may make up the rest. That is part of the price paid later, and only if the practice hits agreed targets after closing.

There is also a post-closing employment agreement, almost always. Its length, its compensation formula and its restrictive covenants are terms, not formalities.

Two offers with identical headline numbers can therefore be worth materially different amounts. I have watched an owner take the bigger headline and receive less money.

And before you compare anything, do the bridge dentists rarely do.

Collections, minus true operating overhead, minus what it would cost to hire an associate at market rate to do your own production. What is left is your adjusted EBITDA.

That is the number a buyer is valuing.

A “percentage of collections” figure quoted at a study club is not the same species of number. Do not let the two sit side by side unconverted.

What changes after the sale

Start with what does not change, because with this model it is more than owners expect.

The sign stays. Imagen’s affiliation announcements consistently name practices that kept their identity, with the same dentists leading them.

That is a real structural difference from a buyer that converts everything to one national banner, and it is why you cannot spot this organization from the street.

Clinical direction is Imagen’s stated position too. Its materials describe doctor-led clinical decision-making and independence over patient care.

Treat every such statement, from every buyer, as the start of a conversation rather than the end of one. The reliable way to test it is not the pitch deck.

It is a phone call with two dentists who affiliated at least two years ago. Long enough for integration to have happened and any honeymoon to have ended.

What does change is the back office. Marketing, recruiting, accounting and finance, revenue cycle management, human resources, compliance and IT move to a central function.

For a great many owners, that is precisely the point.

Your team’s experience changes with it. New benefits, new payroll system, new reporting lines for some roles.

Worth knowing before you tell them, not after.

And in this particular model, one more thing changes that owners rarely anticipate. Your continuing education pathway becomes somebody else’s programme.

Whether that is a gift or a constraint depends on how strong your own study habits already are.

Questions worth asking Imagen specifically

Generic questions get generic answers. These are the ones I would put in front of this buyer.

“Is my equity in the entity created for my practice, in the wider organization, or both, and in what proportion?” The filings show a per-practice entity exists. Ask what it holds.

Then ask what it does not.

“What happens to my units when I eventually stop practicing?” The organization talks about a defined exit pathway. Ask what triggers it, who values it, and on what formula.

“Since there is no financial sponsor behind you, where does the capital for my transaction come from?” A fair, neutral question, and a doctor-led organization should have a clear answer.

“If I need to add cone-beam or chairside milling, is that before or after closing, and who funds it?” This one is worth real money and almost nobody asks it.

“Which clinical decisions remain mine, in writing?” Materials, labs, hygiene protocols, scheduling templates, case acceptance targets. Name them individually rather than accepting a general assurance.

“Which of your practices are near me, and can I speak with those doctors?” Ask for two, by name, rather than accepting whoever is offered. A confident organization arranges that call inside a week.

“Who is my day-to-day contact, and how many practices do they support?” That answer tells you more about your future Monday mornings than any org chart.

Ask these of every buyer, not just this one. The answers are only comparable if the questions are identical.

How to know whether the offer is competitive

Here is what actually decides your outcome, and it is not whose name is on the letterhead.

A buyer who approaches you directly is competing with nobody. Their offer reflects that.

It would be strange if it did not.

The same organization, bidding against three others who also want your practice, behaves differently. Not because the first number was dishonest.

Because the leverage changed.

The pool is deep enough for that to be real.

Becker’s Dental Review counted more than 130 affiliations across the sector in the first part of 2026, following more than 200 in 2025. It also reported that 69 percent of DSOs expect their backers to increase acquisition activity.

The ADSO alone counts 80-plus member organizations. Roughly 30 to 35 acquire independent general practices at meaningful scale.

Most owners have heard of four.

Regional platforms also outbid national ones inside their own footprint more often than owners expect. Filling a gap in a market they already run delivers density and shared-cost benefits.

A scattered national addition delivers none of that.

Creating that competition is what the Elite Selling System exists to do. We hand-select and vet every buyer who gets to bid on your practice, the way a doorman with a velvet rope lets in only the right people.

Then we run a private competitive window inside that group.

The point is not to squeeze anyone. It is that you cannot know whether a number is good until a second serious buyer has told you what they think it is worth.

With a partnership offer this matters more than usual. Competition is what lets you negotiate the shape of the thing.

How much cash. How much equity.

Which layer that equity sits in. Without it you take the structure as presented.

What to do next

If an Imagen approach is on your desk, the first job is not to compare it against your expectations. It is to turn it into something comparable at all.

Get your adjusted EBITDA documented properly, with the owner-production adjustment done honestly rather than optimistically. Separate the cash at close from the equity and the earnout.

Establish which entity the equity actually sits in.

Then read the employment agreement as carefully as you read the price.

And handle the technology question on its own timetable. If your operatory needs upgrading, decide that as a clinical question first and a deal question second.

Imagen may well be the right home.

For a technology-forward dentist who wants liquidity without leaving, who likes ownership at two levels, and who is comfortable holding an illiquid position for years, a doctor-led partnership can suit far better than a clean sale.

Plenty of dentists have found exactly that. The point is to choose it on the facts rather than on the warmth of the letter.

We will give you that assessment free and in confidence, including the answer that you should wait eighteen months and fix two things first when that is the honest one. It starts with a free, confidential practice value estimate.

Our fee varies depending on the value of the practice and is entirely success-based. If we do not get you a result, we do not get paid.

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Frequently asked questions

Does Imagen Dental Partners buy dental practices?

Yes, and actively. Imagen affiliates existing independent practices rather than building new offices, with dated partnership announcements running continuously from 2020 through mid-2026 across states including Washington, Texas, Oregon and Minnesota.

What is a DPO, and how is it different from a DSO?

A dental partnership organization keeps the affiliating dentist as a meaningful owner and generally preserves the local practice name. A conventional support-organization structure more often involves a fuller exit and, in some cases, conversion to a single house brand.

Who owns Imagen Dental Partners?

It describes itself as doctor-led rather than owned by a financial sponsor, and no private equity portfolio listing exists for it. The parent is a Delaware limited liability company formed in 2020, based in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Where does my equity sit if I partner with Imagen?

Public filings show a separate Arizona entity is created for each affiliating practice, alongside the wider organization. Ask specifically which layer your units are in and in what proportion, and get the answer in writing before signing.

Does Imagen require particular technology in my practice?

Yes. Its published model requires chairside CAD/CAM and cone-beam imaging, either already in place or committed to on joining.

Decide whether you want that equipment on clinical grounds first, then negotiate who funds and when.

Will my practice keep its name?

Very likely. Imagen’s affiliation announcements consistently name practices that kept their own identity, and the Imagen name generally appears in the legal structure rather than on the door.

What does Imagen Dental Partners pay for a practice?

There is no published price sheet, and any specific multiple attached to a named buyer is generalized from limited data. What any organization pays depends on the practice, the market, their appetite and, above all, who else is bidding.

Should I accept a direct offer from Imagen?

Not before other qualified buyers have had the chance to bid. A single offer tells you what one organization will pay when nobody is competing.

It tells you nothing about what your practice is worth.

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Sources

Imagen Dental Partners: model, leadership and scale

1. Imagen Dental Partners. “About Us.” imagendentalpartners.com
2. Imagen Dental Partners. “Partnership.” imagendentalpartners.com
3. Imagen Dental Partners. “Life After Partnership.” imagendentalpartners.com
4. Imagen Dental Partners. “Imagen Dental Partners Revolutionizes the Group Practice Model,” 25 January 2021. prnewswire.com
5. DrBicuspid. “Imagen Dental launches as tech-focused DPO.” drbicuspid.com
6. Dentistry Today. “Imagen Dental Partners Embraces the DPO Model.” dentistrytoday.com
7. Becker’s Dental Review. “Where Imagen Dental Partners differs from traditional DSOs.” beckersdental.com

Affiliation activity and corporate filings

8. Imagen Dental Partners. “Leading Bellevue Dental Practice Pineview Aesthetic & Family Dentistry Partners with Imagen Dental Partners,” 15 June 2026. imagendentalpartners.com
9. Imagen Dental Partners. “Floss General + Cosmetic Dentistry Joins Imagen Dental Partners,” 23 July 2026. imagendentalpartners.com
10. Imagen Dental Partners. “Highgrove Dental Care Joins Imagen Dental Partners,” 18 December 2024. imagendentalpartners.com
11. Group Dentistry Now. “DSO Deal Roundup — June 2026,” 1 July 2026. groupdentistrynow.com
12. Becker’s Dental Review. “Imagen Dental Partners adds Washington practice.” beckersdental.com
13. US Securities and Exchange Commission, EDGAR. Company search: entities named “Imagen.” sec.gov
14. US Securities and Exchange Commission, EDGAR. “Imagen Dental Partners, LLC” filing history, CIK 0001819319. sec.gov

Buyer pool, deal activity and market structure

15. Becker’s Dental Review. “130+ DSO affiliations so far in 2026: State-by-state breakdown.” beckersdental.com
16. Becker’s Dental Review. “200+ DSO affiliations in 2025: State-by-state breakdown.” beckersdental.com
17. Becker’s Dental Review. “69% of DSOs plan to boost acquisitions in 2026: Report.” beckersdental.com
18. Becker’s Dental Review. “What the 3 largest DSOs have been up to.” beckersdental.com
19. Association of Dental Support Organizations. “About ADSO.” theadso.org

Deal structure, regulation and practice economics

20. Cranfill Sumner LLP. “Selling Your Dental Practice to a DSO.” cshlaw.com
21. US House Committee on Oversight. “Survey of State Laws Governing the Corporate Practice of Dentistry.” oversight.house.gov