€40m · Debt · Wellness & Beauty · Barcelona, Spain
Image: European Investment Bank (EIB).
Impress, the Barcelona-based digital orthodontics group, has signed a €40m venture-debt loan with the European Investment Bank. Backed by InvestEU, the financing will support further development of the company’s clinical AI platform and expansion in Germany, the Netherlands and the UK.
A clinic network built around one treatment workflow
Impress combines physical clinics with software that follows a patient from diagnosis through treatment. The workflow starts with an in-clinic 3D scan, moves into AI-assisted treatment planning and continues through remote monitoring in the company’s app. That model is designed to preserve clinician involvement while reducing the number of appointments needed during a course of clear-aligner treatment.
The EIB says the platform draws on a database of 500,000 patients. Impress claims this lets its clinics operate ten times more efficiently and reduces in-person visits by 80%; those performance figures are company claims carried in the lender’s announcement, not independently tested outcomes. Impress’s product material says it now operates more than 110 clinics across ten countries.
The commercial mechanism is the connection between software and owned clinical capacity. Better planning and remote follow-up can increase the number of cases a clinic team manages, while the clinic network gives Impress a channel for acquiring and treating patients under the same operating model. The €40m loan can therefore fund both sides of the system: the technology that standardises care and the market expansion that puts it into more locations.
Debt adds scale without changing the operating test
Impress is entering this expansion from a larger base. La Vanguardia reports more than 1,000 employees and says the company expects €145m of revenue in 2026, up from €103m in 2025, when it became EBITDA-positive. The company also expanded through its 2024 acquisition of German rival DrSmile, which Cinco Días reported nearly doubled its size.
Venture debt avoids pricing another equity round, but it also makes execution more concrete: new clinics and acquired practices must be integrated quickly enough to support repayment. For Impress, the key test is whether the same clinical workflow, staff training and patient monitoring can be reproduced across northern European markets without weakening care quality. The EIB financing gives it capital to attempt that rollout; the operating leverage still depends on turning a large clinic estate into a consistent system.
Sources checked:
European Investment Bank · Impress product material · Impress careers · La Vanguardia · Cinco Días · Tech.eu Funding Explorer
