OpenAI

Dandy

OpenAI

OpenAI makes money primarily through API access and subscriptions. The API charges developers per token (roughly per word) for using GPT models in their applications.

ChatGPT Plus costs $20/month for individual users, ChatGPT Team is $25-30/user/month, and ChatGPT Enterprise is custom-priced. Microsoft pays OpenAI licensing fees and also resells OpenAI models through Azure OpenAI Service.

OpenAI reportedly generates over $5 billion in annualized revenue as of 2025, growing at an extraordinary rate.

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.

OpenAI

OpenAI was founded in December 2015 as a nonprofit AI research lab. The founding donors — including Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, and Jessica Livingston — pledged $1 billion with a mission to build artificial general intelligence (AGI) that would benefit all of humanity.

The idea was that AI was too important and too dangerous to leave in the hands of Google alone.

Sam Altman became chairman while Greg Brockman (former CTO of Stripe) became president. Ilya Sutskever, one of the most respected AI researchers alive, left Google Brain to become chief scientist.

The early team was stacked with world-class researchers who published their work openly — hence "Open" AI.

But AI research turned out to be staggeringly expensive. Training large models required millions of dollars in compute.

In 2019, OpenAI created a "capped-profit" subsidiary — investors could earn up to 100x their money, but profits beyond that would flow to the nonprofit. Microsoft invested $1 billion.

The mission was still to save humanity. The method now involved making a lot of money first.

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.

OpenAI

ChatGPT's launch in November 2022 was the growth strategy — it just wasn't planned that way. The team expected a modest research preview.

Instead, ChatGPT hit 1 million users in 5 days and 100 million monthly active users in 2 months, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history. The product went viral because it felt like magic — for the first time, anyone could have a natural conversation with a machine that seemed to understand them.

The Microsoft partnership provided distribution at massive scale. Microsoft integrated OpenAI models into Bing, Office 365 (Copilot), GitHub (Copilot), and Azure.

Overnight, hundreds of millions of Microsoft users had access to OpenAI technology. Microsoft's $13 billion investment was the largest AI bet in history and gave OpenAI nearly unlimited compute.

The API created an ecosystem. Thousands of startups built products on top of OpenAI's models — from customer service bots to coding assistants to content generators.

Each API customer locked themselves into OpenAI's ecosystem, creating switching costs and recurring revenue.

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.

OpenAI

The board crisis of November 2023 nearly destroyed the company. The nonprofit board fired Sam Altman as CEO on a Friday, citing a loss of confidence.

Within 48 hours, 95% of employees threatened to quit and follow Altman to Microsoft. By Tuesday, Altman was reinstated and the board was restructured.

The incident exposed the fundamental tension between OpenAI's nonprofit governance and its for-profit ambitions — a tension that still hasn't been fully resolved.

The cost of training frontier models is eye-watering. Each new GPT generation costs hundreds of millions to train.

OpenAI is reportedly spending over $7 billion annually on compute. The company is burning through cash faster than almost any startup in history, which is why it keeps raising at higher and higher valuations.

If revenue growth slows before costs stabilize, the math gets ugly.

Safety concerns are not going away. Multiple prominent researchers have left OpenAI over disagreements about the pace of development versus safety research.

Ilya Sutskever, the chief scientist who was central to the board's decision to fire Altman, left in 2024 to start a safety-focused AI lab. The public debate about whether OpenAI is moving too fast — and whether its safety commitments are genuine — grows louder with every capability improvement.

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.

OpenAI

ChatGPT is the consumer chatbot — the product that made AI mainstream overnight. GPT-4o is the flagship multimodal model that handles text, images, and audio.

The OpenAI API lets developers integrate GPT into any application. DALL-E generates images from text descriptions.

Whisper transcribes and translates audio. Sora generates videos from text prompts.

GPT Store lets users create and share custom GPT agents. ChatGPT Enterprise gives businesses a private, secure version of ChatGPT with admin controls and no data training.

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.

OpenAI

Microsoft ($13B), Thrive Capital, Khosla Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Founders Fund, Tiger Global, SoftBank, a16z

Dandy

Investors include Bessemer Venture Partners, IVP, DST Global, and IA Ventures. Series C in 2023 valued the company at approximately $1.8 billion.