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Direct-to-consumer orthodontic startup Impress raises $50M to scale across Europe
As the famous phrase goes, “software is eating the world” — and now software is eating dentistry. Or, perhaps more accurately, the arena of orthodontics — the specialty of dentistry that deals with things like braces — is slowly but surely being digitalized.
To whit, Impress, a Southern European player in direct-to-consumer orthodontics, has raised a $50 million Series A funding round led by CareCapital (a dental division of Hillhouse Capital in Asia), along with Nickleby Capital, UNIQA Ventures and investors including Michael Linse, Valentin Pitarque, Peter Schiff, Elliot Dornbusch and others. All existing shareholders, such as TA Ventures and Bynd VC, also participated.
Impress is an homage to the direct-to-consumer startups in this area in the U.S., such as SmileDirect, and now plans to scale across Europe from its existing bases in Spain, Italy, Portugal, the U.K. and France.
The company was founded in 2019 in Barcelona by orthodontist Dr. Khaled Kasem and serial entrepreneurs Diliara and Vladimir Lupenko.
Speaking from Barcelona, Lupenko told me that the idea was to “combine the best orthodontic tradition with the most innovative technology in the sector.”
As things stand, most of the time, consumers can usually only access cosmetic teeth alignment treatments or orthodontic medical treatments in conventional clinics. The new wave of clinics employs 3D scans and panoramic X-rays to check nerve and bone health.
Impress’s model is to offer these high-quality medical treatments directly to consumers, by developing its own chain of orthodontic clinics, which also put an emphasis on design and a “modern” patient experience, it says.
As Diliara Lupenko says: “We didn’t copy what other companies in the space were doing and approached the market from a different angle from the get-go. We doubled down on the doctor-led digital model which brought us way better conversion rates and treatment quality even though on paper it looked complex in the beginning. It’s still very complex but we were able to crack it and scale exponentially.”
Impress now has 75 clinics in Spain, Italy, the U.K., France and Portugal, which optimize costs and automate key parts of the value chain.
It now says it’s approaching €50 million in annual run-rate and is projected to grow to €150 million of revenue in 12 months.
Andreas Nemeth, managing partner of UNIQA Ventures GmbH commented: “Impress’s customer-centric focus, as well as its demonstrated ability to blitzscale, attracted us to the business. Vladimir and his team leverage technology to create a seamless customer journey for invisible orthodontics and optimized their cost structure in a unique way using software.”
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Cast.ai nabs $7.7M seed to remove barriers between public clouds
When you launch an application in the public cloud, you usually put everything on one provider, but what if you could choose the components based on cost and technology and have your database one place and your storage another?
That’s what Cast.ai says that it can provide, and today it announced a healthy $7.7 million seed round from TA Ventures, DNX, Florida Funders and other unnamed angels to keep building on that idea. The round closed in June.
Company CEO and co-founder Yuri Frayman says that they started the company with the idea that developers should be able to get the best of each of the public clouds without being locked in. They do this by creating Kubernetes clusters that are able to span multiple clouds.
“Cast does not require you to do anything except for launching your application. You don’t need to know […] what cloud you are using [at any given time]. You don’t need to know anything except to identify the application, identify which [public] cloud providers you would like to use, the percentage of each [cloud provider’s] use and launch the application,” Frayman explained.
This means that you could use Amazon’s RDS database and Google’s ML engine, and the solution decides how to make that work based on your requirements and price. You set the policies when you are ready to launch and Cast will take care of distributing it for you in the location and providers that you desire, or that makes most sense for your application.
The company takes advantage of cloud-native technologies, containerization and Kubernetes to break the proprietary barriers that exist between clouds, says company co-founder Laurent Gil. “We break these barriers of cloud providers so that an application does not need to sit in one place anymore. It can sit in several [providers] at the same time. And this is great for the Kubernetes application because they’re kind of designed with this [flexibility] in mind,” Gil said.
Developers use the policy engine to decide how much they want to control this process. They can simply set location and let Cast optimize the application across clouds automatically, or they can select at a granular level exactly the resources they want to use on which cloud. Regardless of how they do it, Cast will continually monitor the installation and optimize based on cost to give them the cheapest options available for their configuration.
The company currently has 25 employees with four new hires in the pipeline, and plans to double to 50 by the end of 2021. As they grow, the company is trying keep diversity and inclusion front and center in its hiring approach; they currently have women in charge of HR, marketing and sales at the company.
“We have very robust processes on the continuous education inside of our organization on diversity training. And a lot of us came from organizations where this was very visible and we took a lot of those processes [and lessons] and brought them here,” Frayman said.
Frayman has been involved with multiple startups, including Cujo.ai, a consumer firewall startup that participated in TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield in New York in 2016.
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Investors cozy up to LA-based ettitude’s bamboo bedding and sleep wear with $1.6 million
Ettitude, the Los Angeles-based, direct-to-consumer startup making sustainable bedding and sleepwear from bamboo fibers, has raised a sustainably sized round that should keep the company going even in the face of an economic recession.
Co-founded by the Melbourne, Australia native Phoebe Yu and serial entrepreneur Kat Dey, ettitude sells high-end bamboo bedding made using a process she first heard about in her old job working as an exporter helping chain stores source textiles in China.
Sourced from a factory in Zhejiang, China, near Shanghai, the bamboo textiles are made using non-toxic solvents and a closed-loop system that reuses water for the process, according to Yu.
Yu started selling the cleanBamboo-branded bedding under the ettitude label in Melbourne first, but when she saw the orders begin to pick up from the U.S. she relocated and took her company with her.
Upon arrival, Yu realized she’d need a strong co-founder with experience in branding to help her navigate the massive market in the U.S. So Yu turned to AngelList, which is where she found Dey.
A serial entrepreneur with a background in retail, whose first company TryTheWorld was acquired by EarthBox in 2017, Dey was looking for her next project.
“Phoebe sent me a sample and I had the best night of sleep in my life,” Dey said. From then on the two co-founders began the long, hard slog of marketing their business.
Sales are growing, according to the two women, and the company’s chances have certainly been improved by the capital infusion from Drumbeat Ventures and TA Ventures, a European female-founded fund focusing on technology innovation.
The $1.6 million financing will be used to boost sales and marketing as the company expands beyond bedding — with an average price of $178 for a queen-sized sheet set — and into sleepwear and other categories.
“Phoebe, Kat and their brand, ettitude, are as genuine a combination of passion, purpose, and proprietary product that I’ve seen in the marketplace in my 20 years,” said Drumbeat Ventures founder, Adam Burgoon, in a statement. “They are perfectly positioned to bring their mission of sustainability and comfort to a broader audience.”
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