The Smilist: The Affiliation-First Northeast DSO

In 2014, a new dental group set up shop in Great Neck, on the Nassau County edge of the Queens border, with a deceptively simple pitch to Long Island's independent dentists: keep your name on the door and your hands on the drill, and let someone else handle the payroll, the insurance contracts, and the marketing. Roughly a decade later, that group — The Smilist — has grown from a cluster of Long Island partnerships into a Northeast dental support organization spanning seven states, assembled almost entirely by affiliating established practices whose owners were ready to trade some independence for scale. For investors mapping how consolidation actually plays out in the country's densest, most competitive dental corridor, The Smilist is a clean case study in the affiliation-first playbook.

Overview

The Smilist (legal entity The Smilist Management, Inc.) is a Great Neck, New York-based dental support organization that provides business and administrative support to general and multi-specialty dental practices across the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic.¹ It is a private-equity-backed platform, sponsored by healthcare-focused investment firm Zenyth Partners, and it competes in the same New York metropolitan market as Premier Care Dental Management, the DSO behind the Dental365 brand — the two are the most direct regional analogs in the downstate New York consolidation story.²

Where some consolidators build a single consumer megabrand, The Smilist has grown primarily by affiliation: partnering with owner-dentists — many of them approaching retirement or looking to scale — who join the network, frequently under a co-branded "Smilist of {town}" identity, while the management company centralizes non-clinical operations.¹ The company describes its model as consumer-brand-forward, emphasizing patient experience across a full spectrum of care that spans general, cosmetic, orthodontic, periodontic, endodontic, and oral surgery services.³ That multi-specialty mix lets the network keep specialty referrals — and the associated revenue — inside its own footprint, an advantage that matters most where practice density is high.

For diligence purposes, one naming caution is worth flagging up front: several unrelated consumer brands use the word "Smilist" in teeth-alignment and whitening. This profile concerns only the Great Neck, NY dental support organization and its affiliated practices, not any consumer product of a similar name.

Company Snapshot

• Company: The Smilist (The Smilist Management, Inc.)
• Headquarters: Great Neck, New York (Nassau County, Long Island)
• Founded: 2014
• Model: Affiliation-led, multi-specialty dental support organization with a consumer-brand orientation¹
• Ownership: Private-equity-backed; sponsored by Zenyth Partners (owner of record)²
• Footprint: Company-reported 115+ locations across seven states as of 2025¹
• States: New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and Massachusetts³
• Specialties: General, cosmetic, orthodontics, periodontics, endodontics, oral surgery³
• Employees: Company-reported 1,700+ (directory snapshot)³; reported as 1,200+ in early 2024⁴
• Leadership: Axel Lapica, CEO (appointed May 2025); Philip Toh, President and Co-Founder; Patrick Perodin, COO¹
• Notable financing: $285 million unitranche debt facility closed April 2024⁴

Footprint Analysis

The Smilist's location count has moved quickly, and the reported figure depends heavily on the date and the source — so it deserves careful handling. In early 2024, both the company's financing announcement and its sponsor's portfolio materials described the network as supporting roughly 60 or more locations with over 1,200 employees across five states (New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Delaware, and Pennsylvania).⁴ By September 2024, industry trade coverage put the group at more than 90 locations.⁵ By 2025, following a string of affiliations, the company reported a footprint of more than 115 locations across seven states, a figure echoed by third-party DSO directories that also list roughly 1,700 employees.³ Taken together, that implies the network roughly doubled its reported location count in under two years — an aggressive pace, though one built from many small affiliations rather than a few large platform deals.

A measurement caveat applies throughout: The Smilist and the directories that track it use "offices," "practices," and "locations" somewhat interchangeably, and affiliated groups are frequently counted by their individual sites. When The Smilist affiliated with a 16-location group in New York's Hudson Valley in 2025, for example, that transaction alone was described as lifting the total past 100 locations.¹ Investors should treat the headline number as a company-reported location count, not an audited practice census, and expect some drift between sources published months apart.

Geographically, the center of gravity remains downstate New York — Long Island's Nassau and Suffolk counties, where the group's earliest partnerships clustered in towns like Wantagh, Smithtown, Commack, and Riverhead, plus the surrounding New York metro area.¹ From that base the network has layered outward into New Jersey and Connecticut, then reached south into Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland and north into Massachusetts. The newer states almost certainly represent thinner, more opportunistic footholds than the dense Long Island core, and a 2025 affiliation extended the group west to Buffalo — its first reported presence in Western New York.¹ The result is a footprint that is broad on the map but, by all available evidence, still heavily weighted toward its home metro.

Growth History

The Smilist's expansion has been affiliation-led from the start, and its own press record reads as a nearly year-by-year roll-up. Following its 2014 founding, the group spent its first several years signing individual Long Island owner-dentists — a steady cadence of solo and small-group partnerships from 2015 through 2018, often positioned as succession or retirement transitions for the affiliating dentist.¹ Expansion along eastern Long Island continued into 2021.

The pace stepped up markedly under private-equity ownership. The company reported "record growth" in 2022, adding 15 locations and entering two new states — Pennsylvania (its first partner there, a practice serving Bucks and Montgomery counties) and Connecticut (via a long-established Danbury practice).¹ That momentum set up the platform's most visible financial milestone: in April 2024, The Smilist closed a $285 million unitranche debt facility, with Fidelity Direct Lending as administrative agent and Manulife Investment Management as joint lead arranger. The facility included nearly $100 million of new growth capital earmarked for acquisitions, and the company noted it had completed 30 affiliations in the prior two years.⁴

The capital fueled a busy stretch of dealmaking. In mid-2024, The Smilist affiliated with 23 practices in the Simply Beautiful Smiles group, a move that took it into Maryland as its sixth state.¹ Trade coverage that September reported the group had also acquired Lakeview Dental Care, a roughly six-office group in New Jersey.⁵ Later in 2024 it entered Massachusetts through two Boston-area practices, reaching seven states, and in 2025 it added a multi-specialty group in Buffalo and the 16-location Hudson Valley group that pushed its reported footprint past 100 locations.¹ The precise split between de novo openings and affiliations is not publicly disclosed, but the public record is overwhelmingly acquisition- and affiliation-driven, with de novo growth appearing to play a secondary role.

Leadership has evolved alongside the footprint. Co-founder Philip Toh serves as President, and the platform has been recognized in industry circles — a spot on Becker's "65 DSOs to Know" in 2024 and repeat Great Place to Work certification among them.⁵ Andrew Mintz led the company as CEO through the 2024 financing; in May 2025 The Smilist named Axel Lapica — previously a senior executive at DaVita Kidney Care — as its new chief executive, with Patrick Perodin, a veteran of Marquee Dental Partners and Pacific Dental Services, serving as COO.¹

Competitive Landscape

The Smilist competes on two fronts: for patients across a crowded Northeast market, and for the affiliations of owner-dentists deciding what to do with their practices.

Its closest structural rival is Premier Care Dental Management, the New Hyde Park-based operator of the Dental365 brand, which pursues a similar New York metro density strategy from a base just a few miles away on Long Island. Both are regional, multi-specialty, private-equity-backed platforms betting that referral density in the downstate corridor produces durable economics. In New England, where The Smilist operates through its Massachusetts practices, it runs up against long-established regional consolidators, and in Connecticut it shares geography with clinician-led entrants such as Archway Dental Partners. National platforms — Heartland Dental, Aspen Dental, and the multi-specialty Dental Care Alliance among them — all maintain Northeast locations, but none carries The Smilist's affiliation-branded density in the Long Island core.¹

The Smilist's differentiation rests on a few pillars: a recognizable regional consumer brand layered over affiliated practices, a full in-house specialty referral network, and an affiliation pitch tailored to independent Northeast dentists who want a succession path without decamping to a national brand. The counterweight is that the New York metro area is arguably the highest-cost, most saturated dental market in the country — real estate, wages, and patient-acquisition costs all run hot, and deeply entrenched independent practices remain the norm. Organic growth there is hard-won, and the recent reach into lower-cost states may reflect exactly that pressure.

Market Position

For investors, The Smilist is best read as a maturing regional platform in the middle innings of a private-equity hold. Zenyth Partners is the sponsor of record, and the firm's investment appears well-seasoned: in October 2022, Zenyth completed a continuation-fund transaction — co-led by funds managed by BlackRock and Manulife Investment Management — that carried its portfolio forward into a new vehicle.² The original acquisition date and financial terms of Zenyth's investment in The Smilist are not publicly disclosed, so any specific deal value or entry multiple would be speculation; what is documented is the sponsor relationship, the 2022 continuation vehicle, and the 2024 debt raise.

Three things stand out in the diligence picture. First, the growth math is credible on its face — a documented climb from roughly 60 to 115-plus locations in under two years — but the reliance on many small affiliations raises the usual roll-up questions about integration, brand consistency, and same-practice performance, none of which the company discloses publicly. Second, the recent multi-state expansion is a strategic tell: pushing into Maryland, Massachusetts, and Western New York suggests the dense downstate core is approaching the point where incremental deals command higher prices, and that management is testing whether the affiliation model travels. Third, the platform is now on its second CEO in the current cycle, and a leadership transition mid-hold is worth watching for continuity, even as founder Philip Toh remains in place as President.

Open questions remain the familiar ones for a private DSO: The Smilist does not publicly disclose revenue, EBITDA, same-store performance, payer mix, or its practice-management technology stack, so outside assessments of unit economics rest on inference. And because affiliated groups are counted by their individual sites, the "115-plus locations" headline deserves a closer look in any actual diligence process.

TMR Take: For operators, The Smilist is one of the more active affiliation partners in the Northeast — a dentist-friendly, co-branded model with in-house specialty referrals and a stated succession pitch; owner-dentists weighing offers should compare its keep-your-name approach against groups that fold practices into a single brand, and press for specifics on post-affiliation autonomy and technology. For vendors, a 115-plus-location, centrally managed network across seven states is a legitimate enterprise account in the dense New York market, though its technology stack is not publicly disclosed and purchasing runs through the Great Neck management company rather than individual offices. For investors, The Smilist is a well-constructed regional density play at a natural inflection: a seasoned Zenyth hold that already ran through a 2022 continuation fund, a fresh 2024 debt facility, a new CEO, and a multi-state expansion that will either prove the affiliation model portable or reveal that its economics were always a downstate New York story. Watch the newer states — and any sponsor-level activity — closely.

The Northeast remains one of the most active regions for dental consolidation, and its platforms are moving fast. For how The Smilist's closest rival approaches the same market, see our profile of Premier Care Dental Management, or explore the rest of The Molar Report's market intelligence library.

Sources

1. The Smilist — company website, press room, and affiliation announcements.

2. Zenyth Partners — portfolio disclosures and continuation-fund announcement.

3. GoTu DSO Directory — The Smilist company profile.

4. The Smilist — $285 million debt facility announcement (PR Newswire).

5. Group Dentistry Now and Becker's Dental Review — DSO rankings and deal coverage.