3Shape Brand Guidelines: The Copenhagen Student Start-Up Behind the TRIOS Intraoral Scanner

Two students, a 3D-imaging thesis and a first market in hearing aids.

3Shape began with a university project. In 1999, the company says, two Danish students met: Nikolaj Deichmann, who was studying business, and Tais Clausen, an engineer whose master’s thesis dealt with 3D imaging. English Wikipedia places Clausen’s thesis at the Technical University of Denmark and Deichmann at Copenhagen Business School. They decided to pursue a business idea together and opened a company under the name 3Shape in 2000, the founding year given both by the company’s own history and by English Wikipedia.

Its first market was not dentistry. For roughly its first five years, 3Shape says, it worked almost exclusively with hearing-aid companies. That side of the business has not disappeared: English Wikipedia describes 3Shape as a developer and manufacturer of 3D scanners and CAD/CAM software for both the dental and the audio industries, and the company still lists a 3Shape Audio line on its website. As the early work grew, the founders turned to the field that would become their main industry.

The turn came in 2005, when 3Shape introduced its first software for dental laboratories, used to design restorations and to prepare them for computer-aided manufacturing. In the same period, the company says, it opened an office of developers in Kyiv, Ukraine, and a manufacturing site in Poland that soon began producing about a thousand scanners a year. English Wikipedia says 3Shape now has production facilities and offices in China, Europe, Latin America and the United States.

A 3Shape press release of June 2020 described Clausen and Deichmann as the company’s co-chief executives and announced that Jakob Just-Bomholt, who came from the emergency-services group Falck after a long career at A.P. Moller-Maersk, would take over as chief executive from August 2020. The two founders moved to the board as co-vice chairmen, roles they still hold.

TRIOS, the lab scanners and a platform called Unite.

The product most associated with the name is TRIOS, an intraoral scanner: a handheld device that records a digital 3D impression of the teeth instead of a physical mould. 3Shape launched TRIOS in 2011 and says it was the first intraoral scanner on the market to allow scanning without powder. TRIOS 3 followed in 2015, and in 2017 the company introduced TRIOS 3 Wireless, which it describes as the world’s first wireless intraoral scanner.

Later generations kept the name. The company says TRIOS 5 Wireless, released at the end of 2022, was its smallest and lightest scanner to that date, with more than fifty changes to ease of use and design over earlier models. TRIOS Core arrived in 2024 as what 3Shape calls its most affordable TRIOS, alongside a single-use scanner tip and a smaller, lighter version of TRIOS 3. At the IDS dental trade fair in 2025 the company launched TRIOS 6, which it says uses hyperspectral technology, together with software called Dx Plus.

Laboratories are the other half of the catalogue, and the half 3Shape started with in dentistry. Its lab range includes the F8 dual-model scanner, the E Series scanners and the Dental System design software, with smaller Studio Apps for specific tasks. In 2021 the company launched 3Shape Unite, a platform on which, it says, clinicians can take a scan, choose a treatment or partner, and send the scan on to a laboratory; a third generation of Unite, released in 2024, added cloud storage and access to scan files from anywhere.

Much of the recognition 3Shape cites is for industrial design. Its history page links the company’s technology with “award-winning Scandinavian design” and says that in 2023 TRIOS 5 Wireless won a Red Dot design award while the F8 lab scanner received a Red Dot “Best of the Best” award for what the company calls its open design. In February 2026 the company announced that TRIOS 6 had won the European Product Design Award for 2025. On the dental side, English Wikipedia records Cellerant Best in Class awards for 2015, 2016 and 2017, and 3Shape says the 2023 award was its eleventh in a row for best scanner.

Design and documentation.

Dental implant and digital-dentistry companies sell to a narrow, expert audience, and their pictures show it. The typical product image is a small titanium screw shot on a white or pale grey ground, often beside its abutment and the driver that seats it, and lit to show the thread and the surface. Packaging tends to follow the same order: clean white boxes, colour codes for sizes, and the product line’s name set larger than the company’s.

Digital dentistry adds a second set of images. Intraoral scanners appear as slim wands next to a laptop or a cart, and the screen matters as much as the hardware: a coloured three-dimensional render of an arch, a planned implant position inside a CT slice, or a crown being shaped in design software. Milling machines and printers are shown with the blocks and discs they cut, and finished work is usually photographed as a single milled crown or bridge on a neutral surface.

The third subject is the clinician. Implant makers run training courses, symposia and hands-on sessions, and their brochures and press releases often show lecture halls and dentists at practice models rather than patients. Trade fairs carry much of that presentation: IDS, the International Dental Show in Cologne, and the congresses of the European Association for Osseointegration are where companies set up large stands, launch product lines and gather speakers.

The result is a category that looks clinical and orderly, with white space, steel greys and one or two accent colours carrying most of the identity. The companies in this guide include implant makers from South Korea, Europe, Brazil and the United States, alongside firms in intraoral scanners, lasers and CAD/CAM software. Each guide sets out who founded the company, who owns it now and what it says about where its products are made, separating documented facts from the company’s own claims.

From founder-led to a board-appointed management.

Since 2020 the company has been run by executives from outside. In March 2025 Dental Tribune reported that the board had named Jacob Vishof Paulsen, who came from the Danish bioscience company Chr. Hansen and had earlier worked at McKinsey and Thermo Fisher Scientific, as chief executive, succeeding Just-Bomholt after five years in the role. The chairman, Jørgen Jensen, said that Just-Bomholt had played a key role in moving 3Shape on from being a founder-led company. In November 2026 the company’s leadership page names Indraneel Kanaglekar as chief executive, with Jensen as chairman and Clausen and Deichmann as vice chairmen of the board.

The scale has changed with the leadership. Where the history began with two students, 3Shape now says it has about 2,330 employees of more than 46 nationalities, staff in 28 countries and products sold in more than 100 markets, with its headquarters still in Copenhagen. The company states its aim as helping clinics and laboratories provide “superior dental care for every patient, every time.”

The colours and type in this guide are our own choice. What the company does document is the importance it gives to physical design: its awards are for objects that people hold and handle, a handheld scanner and a desktop lab scanner, and its history page names design alongside technology as part of how it describes itself.

For a design guide, 3Shape shows how a software-and-scanner company can tell its story through a few long-running product names, with TRIOS carried from 2011 to the present. Compare Align Technology, another company in digital dentistry, and Medit, the Seoul scanner maker. For this guide we use a harbour slate, a pale mint and a cool grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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