Compare / Dandy vs Medallion
DANDY
The dental lab industry — the people who actually make your crowns, veneers, and implants — was stuck in the 1…
MEDALLION
Derek Lo looked at how healthcare organizations verify that their doctors and nurses are actually licensed and…
AT A GLANCE
FUNDING HISTORY
Dandy
Medallion
BUSINESS MODEL
Dandy
Vertical SaaS plus manufacturing. Dandy provides dental practices with intraoral scanners (often subsidized or free to eliminate the switching cost), cloud-based software for managing cases, and its own network of digital dental labs that manufacture the final restorations.
Dentists pay per case — each crown, bridge, veneer, or implant restoration is priced individually. The margin comes from manufacturing efficiency: digital workflows are faster, more precise, and require less manual labor than traditional hand-sculpted methods.
As volume grows, Dandy's labs get more efficient and per-unit costs drop. It's the classic razor-and-blades model — give away the scanner, make money on every restoration.
Medallion
Medallion charges healthcare organizations a subscription based on the number of providers being managed. The platform handles initial credentialing (verifying a new provider) and ongoing monitoring (ensuring licenses stay current, no disciplinary actions arise).
The value is measured in speed and cost savings. Credentialing departments at hospitals can cost millions annually in staff salaries.
Medallion replaces much of that manual labor with software. Faster credentialing also means faster time-to-revenue — a doctor who can start seeing patients weeks earlier generates revenue weeks earlier.
The platform also manages payer enrollment — getting providers into insurance networks — which is a related but separate bureaucratic process that's equally painful and equally automatable.
HOW THEY STARTED
Dandy
Henry Stott was a repeat entrepreneur who had previously co-founded a tech company in the UK. When he looked at the dental industry, he saw a $15 billion lab market that was shockingly analog.
Here's how it worked: a dentist jams a tray of gooey putty into your mouth, waits for it to harden, mails the physical mold to a dental lab, where a technician hand-sculpts your crown out of ceramic. Turnaround: 2 to 3 weeks.
Error rate: high. Patient experience: miserable.
The technology to do this digitally had existed for years — 3D intraoral scanners, CAD/CAM software, CNC milling machines — but nobody had stitched it into a seamless end-to-end platform for the average dental practice. Stott started Dandy in 2020 to be that platform.
Provide the scanner, build the software, run the lab — and make it so easy that any dentist can switch from analog to digital without changing how they practice.
Medallion
Derek Lo was working in healthcare operations when he encountered credentialing — the process of verifying that healthcare providers have the proper licenses, education, training, and malpractice history to practice medicine. Every doctor, nurse, and therapist in America must be credentialed before they can see patients at a new facility or join an insurance network.
The process was absurdly manual. It involved contacting medical schools, state licensing boards, previous employers, malpractice insurers, and the DEA — often by fax or mail.
A single credentialing verification could take 90-180 days. Healthcare organizations employed entire departments of people doing nothing but chasing down verifications through a patchwork of government databases, phone calls, and paper forms.
Lo founded Medallion in 2020 to automate this process. The platform connects directly to primary sources — state licensing boards, the National Practitioner Data Bank, DEA databases, and medical school registries — and pulls verification data automatically.
What used to take months of manual work now takes days or weeks.
HOW THEY GREW
Dandy
Land-and-expand with dental practices. Dandy gives practices the scanner for free or at heavy discount, which eliminates the biggest barrier to switching from analog.
Once a practice starts submitting digital scans, they become recurring revenue — every patient who needs a crown is a Dandy order. Sales team targets mid-size practices (3 to 10 dentists) that are high-volume but haven't invested in digital yet.
Referral programs where existing dentists recommend Dandy to colleagues. Geographic density strategy — build lab capacity in a region, then saturate practices nearby to optimize logistics and turnaround times.
Content marketing educating dentists on why digital is better, faster, and more profitable than analog workflows.
Medallion
Medallion grew by targeting healthcare organizations that were drowning in credentialing backlogs. Telehealth companies scaling rapidly during COVID were the first ideal customers — they needed to credential hundreds of providers quickly across multiple states, and the manual process couldn't keep up.
The platform expanded to hospitals, health systems, and staffing agencies that manage large provider networks. Each customer type faces the same fundamental problem: too many providers to credential, too few staff to do it, and too many regulatory requirements to track manually.
Integration partnerships with HR systems and practice management platforms drove distribution. When Medallion plugs into a health system's existing tech stack, the switching costs climb and the data integration deepens.
THE HARD PART
Dandy
Dental practices are notoriously resistant to change — many dentists have used the same lab for 20 years and switching feels risky. The scanner hardware is expensive to subsidize at scale, creating a capital-intensive land grab.
Quality control across distributed manufacturing is hard — a crown that doesn't fit means a remake, an unhappy patient, and a dentist who might switch back to their old lab. Competition from established digital players like Align Technology and legacy lab companies investing in their own digital capabilities.
The dental industry is fragmented — 200,000+ practices in the US, mostly small businesses, which means enterprise-style sales don't work. Each practice is its own decision maker with its own habits.
Medallion
Healthcare is notoriously slow to adopt new technology. Decision-makers at hospitals and health systems are risk-averse and procurement cycles are long.
Selling enterprise software to healthcare organizations requires patience, compliance certifications, and relationships that take years to build.
The credentialing ecosystem involves hundreds of independent data sources — each state licensing board has its own system, formats, and response times. Building and maintaining connections to all of these sources is operationally complex and requires constant updating as boards change their processes.
Competition from established credentialing verification organizations (CVOs) and legacy software providers means Medallion is displacing existing processes and vendors, not entering a greenfield market.
THE PRODUCTS
Dandy
Dandy Scanner — provided to dental practices, captures a full 3D digital impression of the patient's mouth in minutes. No more putty molds.
Cloud-based case management platform where dentists submit scans, approve designs, and track orders. AI-powered restoration design that generates crown and veneer designs automatically from 3D scans, reducing turnaround from weeks to days.
Digital dental lab network with automated CNC milling and 3D printing for manufacturing restorations. Shade matching technology using AI to color-match restorations to surrounding teeth.
Integration with practice management software so cases flow seamlessly from scan to delivery.
Medallion
Medallion Credentialing — automated primary source verification of healthcare provider qualifications including licenses, education, training, and malpractice history. Medallion Monitoring — continuous license and exclusion monitoring that alerts organizations when a provider's credentials change or expire.
Medallion Payer Enrollment — automated management of insurance network applications and re-enrollments across multiple payers. Medallion Provider Network Management — a unified platform for managing the complete provider lifecycle from recruitment through credentialing to ongoing compliance.
Medallion Analytics — dashboards showing credentialing pipeline status, bottleneck identification, and compliance metrics.
WHO BACKED THEM
Dandy
Investors include Bessemer Venture Partners, IVP, DST Global, and IA Ventures. Series C in 2023 valued the company at approximately $1.8 billion.
Medallion
Sequoia Capital led the Series B. Optum Ventures (part of UnitedHealth Group) invested — a significant strategic validation from the largest healthcare company in America.
Tiger Global and GV (Google Ventures) participated in earlier rounds.