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Startup leverages AI workflow optimization to streamline procurement process for dental practices.
The founders of Wellplaece, a dental marketplace that consolidates the buying process across all clinician products and vendors, have announced the company's Private Beta launch in addition to a $5.5M seed round which includes funding from a pre-seed round.
Wellplaece describes itself as a more streamlined way for Dental Support Organizations (DSOs), group, and single practices to purchase supplies. Currently, ordering supplies, and any kind of comparison shopping for the best dental products is a fragmented process, one that also is time-consuming, costly, and prone to human error, according to Wellplaece.
Unlike other companies in the dental marketplace space, the San Francisco startup’s performance-based business model leverages built-in AI to deliver newfound savings to its clients, DSOs, and dental practices everywhere at no cost to them. The company leverages aggregated customer volume to get their practices market-competitive pricing, and customer-specific settings to enable practice or group specific purchasing behaviors across a large network of suppliers. Clients are only billed after their orders are successfully processed, placed, and confirmed delivered, according to Wellplaece.
Based on the company’s internal research, dental practice offices rely on at least 3 and up to 7 different suppliers on average. Wellplaece ultimately empowers dental offices to spend their time more efficiently. It also provides data to power interoffice optimization, decision making, and business intelligence, particularly valuable toward the management of group practices.
The funding was led by Eniac Ventures and Bee Partners, along with participation from Erik Anderson, Co-founder CEO WestRiver Group; Haroon Mokhtarzada, CEO & Co-founder of TrueBill and RocketMoney; Andy Oreffice, former CCO of Affordable Healthcare; and entrepreneur Francis Hellyer.
Wellplaece plans to be a platform for dental offices to source the right products at the best prices. Co-founded by Caen Contee, serial entrepreneur and founding team member of global micromobility startup Lime; and CTO, lead software engineer Ivan Bertona, the company already reports achieving significant growth, proven consistent customer savings, and is scaling up to meet industry demand with the launch of their automated, multi-vendor supply product purchasing platform.
"I am constantly working to save, in order to take the pressure off of our top line, so we can focus on quality of care," says Armand Begian, DDS, of Sugarbug Dental. "I value the relationships I have with my traditional suppliers, and I thought I had negotiated good prices. I can't believe the savings Wellplaece has been able to optimize on our behalf."
Wellplaece's proprietary technology is said to shop an ever-expanding network of suppliers on the client's behalf, resulting in more streamlined access to the right products for a better price. Wellplaece places the order and manages supplier logistics while only charging the client once for the aggregated cart of supplies. In addition, Wellplaece even manages returns and chargebacks when necessary.
"By utilizing our AI-empowered tech to do the shopping across a much-expanded supply network, we help dental practices make more informed, consolidated, and informed decisions on the procurement process," says Wellplaece Co-founder Caen Contee. "As the dental industry and private group practices evolve into this new decade, it's becoming clear that it's just as important and impactful to save on the bottom line and make your practice more operationally efficient as much as it is to focus on topline growth, upselling patients, treatments, and maximizing patient throughput."
By the end of Q2, Wellplaece will have doubled its distributor and manufacturer supplier network and is on track to onboard 100+ new locations over the coming quarters, according to a press release.