Inside Dandy: From 2018 to Now Into a $418 million business
Startup Type:
Headquarter: New York City, USA
Current Status: Active (private; expanding its lab capabilities and dentist network)
Founders: Nick Greenfield
Founded Year: 2018
Investors: SmileDirectClub, Coatue, Tiger Global
Funding Raised: $418 million
What Is the business model of Dandy?
Digital dentistry startup that provides a full-service platform for dental practices to order custom crowns, aligners, and other dental prosthetics from Dandy’s centralized lab; it charges per case and via subscriptions for its software and scanner
How Dandy got started?
Founded in 2018, Dandy originally started as a direct-to-consumer dental product venture but pivoted to B2B: equipping dentists with intraoral scanners and a software portal, then handling end-to-end fabrication of crowns and retainers in its own labs, aiming to modernize the $10B dental lab market
what growth strategy has Dandy followed?
Drove adoption by offering dentists free 3D scanners and a slick digital workflow that replaces mailing physical impressions, raised large funding to build out high-tech fabrication facilities, using speed and quality as selling points to sign up over a thousand practices quickly
what are the top products/features of Dandy
Dandy dental lab platform, intraoral 3D scanner, Dandy Portal for case management, products like crowns, clear aligners, dentures
what was the biggest challenge faced by Dandy?
Had to win over traditionally analog dental offices to trust a startup with critical lab work, and manage the logistics of rapid dental manufacturing while scaling up a salesforce to onboard thousands of dentists amid competition from established labs and newer entrants