Walk into any dental clinic on any given morning and the ritual is the same. Gloves on, light adjusted – and a disposable paper mask pulled from a box that looks almost identical to the one used a century ago. By lunchtime it’s clinical waste.
GP and dental practices discard around 4 billion masks a year. Each one takes 450 years to break down, shedding microplastics the whole time. And in real-world conditions – not lab conditions – surgical masks filter as little as 10 to 15% of airborne particles. The global medical mask market is worth €14.8 billion, and it has seen almost no fundamental product innovation in a hundred years.
Benny Shoham noticed. A serial founder with 25 filed patents and a background spanning hardware, medtech, and controlled-environment agriculture, he’d spent years working with Negative Air Ion (NAI) technology when a conversation with a dentist changed everything. The dentist had shut his clinic for a week after catching flu from a patient. He’d been pulling his mask down during long procedures because of heat and fogging – choosing comfort over protection because the mask forced him to.
That conversation revealed a serious problem facing healthcare professionals using masks. Benny believed he could build a better solution, and SCUDOdoc was born: the world’s first digitally controlled ion-plasma filter mask.
In lab tests, SCUDOdoc’s mask filters out 93.6% of harmful particles – even when air pollution is three times worse than the legal indoor limit – compared to 71.6% for the best N95 mask tested under the same conditions. Customers pay around €400 per reusable mask per year – this saves money and prevents millions of single-use masks landing in landfill. The initial target market is France’s 47,000 private dental practices. SCUDOdoc is raising $2 million in pre-seed funding.
We sat down with Benny to hear the full story.
Explain negative air ion technology to someone who has never heard of it.
Negative Air Ions (NAIs), which are released naturally in forests, are charged molecules that SCUDOdoc generates at high density to actively inactivate and remove airborne particles, pollen, and viruses rather than simply trapping them in a filter.
They work by damaging viral protein envelopes through oxidation and electrostatic forces and causing particles to clump together and fall out of the air. Independent studies in Japan and Europe have shown strong results, including rapid inactivation of major respiratory viruses and more than 99% removal of airborne pollen and allergens in both lab and real-world conditions.
Take us back to the beginning. You were building NAI-based solutions – what made you think this technology could be applied to face masks?
The optimism comes from proof-of-concept data and years of direct experience working with ion-plasma and NAI systems. In my previous venture, GreenOnyx, NAI was used in our novel QantumFarm indoor farming platform, where it showed strong air-sanitising performance against viruses, bacteria, and airborne fungi while also improving plant growth rates.
Testing was also done in space via a mini QantumFarm module with NASA on the International Space Station. That experience built confidence that NAI is both safe and effective when applied in a well-designed product.
During early proof-of-concept testing, the NAI-based filter was tested at three times the EPA maximum indoor air-particle threshold. The device achieved more than 90% particle filtration and outperformed the best high-grade protected face masks (N95s) tested under the same conditions, which reached 70%. That result changed the question from whether the technology could work to why no one had yet turned it into a clinical wearable product.
The likely answer was simple: no one had seriously attempted to miniaturize NAI into a commercially viable mask format.
Surgical masks filter as low as 10–15% in real-world conditions. Why has this gap been tolerated for so long?
Medical masks have historically been assessed against laboratory standards that measure filtration in controlled, static conditions rather than during a full clinical shift.
The gap between certified performance and real-world protection was difficult to measure at scale, and certification frameworks were not built to capture it. Greater scrutiny during and after COVID-19 brought that gap into sharper focus. SCUDOdoc addresses this by treating filtration as an active, continuously operating system rather than a passive barrier.
This is your third startup as co-founding CEO. What did you get wrong before that you’re doing differently now?
In earlier ventures, regulatory compliance was treated as something to address after the technology had been validated. In medtech, that approach is a mistake because the regulatory path helps define the product itself.
With SCUDOdoc, the CE and MDR pathways were mapped before finalising the product architecture. The second change was go-to-market discipline: instead of chasing the broadest possible use case, the focus is on a precise first segment – the French private dental sector.
Who is your initial customer, and what does the purchasing decision actually look like?
The initial customer is the owner-operator of a private dental clinic in Europe, with general practitioners as a possible next segment. For that buyer, the decision is direct: adopt SCUDOdoc through an annual upgrade program priced to match the clinic’s existing yearly spend on disposable masks while delivering better protection, greater comfort, higher operational efficiency, and no clinical waste.
There is no long hospital procurement cycle or committee approval process; it is a single professional purchase based on performance, cost, and values alignment.
Traction & business model
You’re pre-seed, seeking $2 million. Where is the product at today?
SCUDOdoc has a proof-of-concept device that has completed bench-level filtration testing under controlled conditions. At three times the EPA indoor maximum, the device achieved 93.6% particle filtration, compared with 71.6% for the best N95 tested under the same conditions. What has not yet been completed is independent third-party certification or the CE/MDR filing process.
The $2 million pre-seed round is intended to fund independent validation, begin regulatory submissions, and deploy the first pilot units with EU clinical partners.
The device is priced to sit within the annual disposable-mask spend of a typical dental or GP professional, which for N95 masks is between €500 to €1,000 per year. The ECO loyalty program frames that spend as an annual upgrade: the clinician returns the previous device, it is refurbished and donated, and the user receives an updated unit. Because the product is built around miniaturised electronics and a recyclable frame rather than consumable media, its cost structure is fundamentally different from conventional masks. The target gross margin of roughly 90% reflects commercial-scale production, not current prototype economics.
You chose to start with private dental clinics in France. Why France, why dental, why private?
Those three choices reinforce each other:
Dental practice creates some of the highest aerosol exposure in clinical care.
Private clinics have faster purchasing autonomy than public or institutional buyers.
France is the largest private dental market in Europe, with about 47,000 private dentists – which also creates a practical path into the wider EU market.
Together, these factors make private dental clinics in France the most efficient beachhead for both clinical evidence generation and commercial traction.
What do investors consistently misunderstand when they look at SCUDOdoc?
The most common misread is to see SCUDOdoc as a conventional PPE company. Traditional PPE is a low-margin, high-volume commodity business with supply concentrated in Asian manufacturing.
SCUDOdoc is positioned instead as a patent-protected medtech platform with recurring revenue, active filtration technology, and a very different margin profile. Establishing that distinction early is essential to a serious investor conversation.
What is your actual investable thesis?
The global medical mask market is a €14.8 billion category with limited fundamental product innovation in the past century, despite the growing disparity between certified performance and real-world protection.
SCUDOdoc replaces a disposable commodity with a reusable active-filtration device that aims to surpass existing masks, reduce the lifetime cost for clinical practices, and mitigate the environmental impact of non-recyclable PPE waste.
It adheres to key ESD criteria by addressing a highly contaminating product with a clean one that can be profitably manufactured locally, thereby freeing our healthcare system from the dependency on inexpensive, highly polluting imports.
GP and dental clinics discard around 4 billion masks a year — hazardous waste breaking down into microplastics for 450 years. What does that number mean to you personally?
The number reflects a deep contradiction: clinicians work every day to protect health, yet the tools they rely on also contribute to long-term environmental harm. Four billion masks a year from GP and dental practices alone, each persisting as microplastic pollution for centuries, is not a marginal problem.
A clinic that adopts SCUDOdoc could replace up to 10,000 disposable masks over a five-year device life and avoid about 3.6 kilograms of microplastic pollution per device. That makes the environmental impact concrete and measurable at the level of each clinical practice.
Why do you feel it’s essential that your innovation exists in the world?
Clinical professionals carry a disproportionate airborne exposure risk over the course of their careers. The tools available to them today still leave a measurable gap between expected protection and actual protection. SCUDOdoc’s purpose is to close that gap with a device that also avoids creating a lasting environmental burden. Protection and sustainability should not be trade-offs.
What is the one lesson from building hardware companies that every early-stage hardware founder should hear?
The gap between a working prototype and a reliable product in the hands of a real customer is usually larger and more expensive than founders expect.
Across multiple ventures and 25 filed patents, the consistent pattern is that the decisive challenge is rarely the core engineering alone; it is the stretch between technical validation and operational deployment.
That includes regulatory timelines, supply-chain assumptions, and adoption cycles that are often modelled too optimistically. The key discipline is to map that full path honestly and fund it adequately.
Rapid-fire
A favourite mantra?
What if we fail? Right – but what if we fly?
One daily habit that keeps you sharp?
Find your north and remember why you are doing this.
If you could teleport yourself into the future and be anywhere, doing anything – where would you be, and why?
Most likely still happily working on a new ‘Zero to One’ venture from a coffee shop in Tokyo, a city I feel at home in after living there for many years, I often re-visit and it’s also where I incepted SCUDO.
SCUDOdoc is one of the more genuinely novel hardware plays I’ve come across – active filtration in a space that hasn’t changed in a century. If you’d like an introduction to Benny, just get in touch.
