CAO Group Inc.

I'll research this company now.

Company overview. CAO Group, Inc. is a privately held Utah corporation headquartered at 4628 West Skyhawk Drive, West Jordan, Utah. Founded in 2000 by Dr. Densen Cao, who developed one of the first LED dental curing lights, the company remains private, with no public ticker. PitchBook lists roughly 103 employees and third-party data aggregators place headcount in the 100–250 band and revenue in the $10–50M range; CAO received a ~$677K PPP loan in 2020. Its dental business was consolidated under wholly owned subsidiary AMD Lasers, Inc. in March 2024; related entities include CAO Lighting, Inc. (d/b/a Lumist Oral Care).

Products/operations. CAO is an operating manufacturer, not an NPE. It develops, manufactures, and sells dental devices and consumables from a 60,000 sq. ft. FDA-registered, ISO-certified facility, with a joint-venture manufacturing arm in China. Product lines include soft-tissue diode lasers (Picasso), LED curing lights (Monet), teeth-whitening strips (Sheer White! and VivaStyle-adjacent dentistry channels), digital x-ray sensors, imaging/diagnostics devices, and restorative, endodontic, preventive, infection-control, and accessory products. It sells direct, through distributor Henry Schein, and via distributors outside the US. Divisions have also covered forensic, veterinary, medical, and lighting applications.

Patent-litigation posture. CAO is an active two-way litigant but predominantly a plaintiff asserting its own patents: 6 plaintiff cases versus 1 defendant case in the tracked data. Its suits assert a family of related peroxide-gel/whitening-strip patents (US 10,603,259; 10,646,419; 11,219,582; 11,826,444; 11,826,445) against competitors and online sellers, often via "Schedule A" mass-defendant complaints filed in the N.D. Ill. It is not characterized as an NPE; Stanford's NPE database labels it a "product company."

Notable cases. CAO v. Walmart (D. Utah, 2024) and CAO v. Ivoclar Vivadent (D. Del., 2025) target retail and professional whitening strips. The single defendant-side case, Ranir LLC v. CAO Group (D. Utah, 2024), is a declaratory-judgment action brought by Ranir (a Perrigo subsidiary) seeking non-infringement and invalidity of the same patents. Earlier litigation involved LED-lighting patents against GE Lighting, Osram Sylvania, and others, and a P&G whitening-strip suit against CAO.