DANDY

Daniel Hanover and Toni Oloko met at the University of Pennsylvania. Hanover had been a product manager at Yelp and an engineer at Facebook.

Oloko had worked on special projects at goPuff and had sold an earlier startup, PracticeGigs. They first launched as Orthly, a direct-to-consumer clear aligner company, then pivoted to selling to dentists under the Dandy name.

The insight was that the dental lab business was shockingly analog. A dentist presses a tray of putty into your mouth, mails the mold to a lab, and a technician hand-sculpts your crown.

Turnaround is weeks and remakes are common. The technology to do this digitally, intraoral scanners, CAD software and milling machines, already existed.

Nobody had stitched it into one service for the average dental practice. Dandy set out to provide the scanner, the software and the lab in one package.

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.

Dandy gives practices an intraoral scanner that captures a 3D digital impression of the patient's mouth in minutes, so no more putty molds. A cloud portal lets dentists submit scans, approve designs and track orders.

Software-assisted design and Dandy's own digital labs, with milling and 3D printing, make the final crowns, bridges, dentures and other restorations.

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.

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.

Dandy's latest round was a $95 million Series C in September 2025, led by General Catalyst with Greenoaks, Addition, Inspired Capital and Primary Venture Partners. Earlier rounds are not well documented, and third-party databases disagree wildly on the total raised.