Stripe

Dandy

Stripe

Stripe charges a flat 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction. That's it.

No setup fees, no monthly fees, no hidden charges. The simplicity is the product.

When a customer pays on a website using Stripe, Stripe handles everything — fraud detection, currency conversion, bank transfers, tax calculation, compliance. The merchant just sees money arrive in their account.

On top of the core payments, Stripe has built an entire financial infrastructure stack. Billing for subscriptions, Connect for marketplace payments, Atlas for incorporating a company, Issuing for creating virtual cards, Treasury for banking-as-a-service, and Radar for fraud prevention.

They're basically building the financial plumbing for the entire internet.

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.

Stripe

Patrick Collison was 19. His brother John was 17.

They had already built and sold a company — Auctomatic, an eBay auction tool — for $5 million while still teenagers in Limerick, Ireland. Patrick went to MIT, John went to Harvard, and they both dropped out because they had a better idea.

The idea was embarrassingly obvious in hindsight. In 2010, accepting payments on the internet was a nightmare.

You had to get a merchant account, negotiate with a payment processor, deal with a gateway provider, handle PCI compliance, and write thousands of lines of code. It took weeks or months.

The Collisons thought it should take five minutes.

They built a simple API — seven lines of code — that let any developer start accepting credit card payments immediately. No merchant account.

No paperwork. No phone calls with banks.

Just paste seven lines of code and you're in business. They originally called it /dev/payments, then changed it to Stripe in 2011.

Peter Thiel and Elon Musk — the PayPal mafia — were among the first investors. Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz piled in soon after.

The Collisons had built exactly what every developer on Earth had been wishing for.

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.

Stripe

Stripe grew almost entirely through developer love. They didn't hire a sales team for years.

They didn't run ads. They just built the best developer documentation anyone had ever seen and let word of mouth do the rest.

The developer-first strategy was deliberate. The Collisons realized that in a startup, the developer usually decides which payment provider to use.

If you make the developer happy, you win the company. Stripe's API documentation became legendary — clear, beautiful, with working code examples in every language.

They also grew by growing with their customers. Early Stripe customers included tiny startups that later became giants — Lyft, DoorDash, Instacart, Shopify.

As those companies scaled to billions in revenue, Stripe's processing volume scaled with them. Stripe didn't need to acquire new customers because its existing ones kept getting bigger.

The international expansion was methodical. Instead of launching everywhere at once like Uber, Stripe carefully added country after country, making sure each one worked perfectly with local payment methods, currencies, and regulations.

By 2024 they were processing payments in 195 countries.

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.

Stripe

Valuation whiplash. In 2021, Stripe hit a peak valuation of $95 billion during the fintech boom.

By 2023, they had to mark it down to $50 billion during the tech correction — a 47% drop that made headlines everywhere. Employees who had been paper millionaires suddenly weren't.

The valuation has since recovered to $91 billion after a secondary share sale in 2025, but those two years were rough for morale.

Competition is relentless. Adyen, the Dutch payments company, has been eating into Stripe's enterprise market.

Square (now Block) competes on the small business side. PayPal is everywhere.

New fintech players pop up constantly. The payments business has razor-thin margins and everyone is fighting for the same 2.9%.

Going public is the elephant in the room. Stripe has been expected to IPO for years.

Investors, employees, and the media keep asking when. The Collisons have consistently said they're in no rush, but with $8.7 billion raised and thousands of employees holding stock options, the pressure to provide liquidity is enormous.

As of 2025, they've opted for secondary sales instead of a public offering.

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.

Stripe

Stripe Payments is the core — accept credit cards, debit cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and 135+ payment methods in 195 countries. Stripe Connect lets marketplaces and platforms pay out to sellers (Shopify, Lyft, DoorDash all use it).

Stripe Billing handles subscription and recurring billing. Stripe Atlas lets you incorporate a US company from anywhere in the world — fill out a form, get a Delaware C-corp, bank account, and tax ID in days.

Stripe Radar uses machine learning to block fraud in real time. Stripe Treasury lets platforms offer banking services to their customers.

Stripe Tax automatically calculates and collects sales tax in every jurisdiction.

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.

Stripe

Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, Founders Fund, Tiger Global, GV (Google Ventures), Goldman Sachs, Baillie Gifford

Dandy

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