Caen Contee is a co-founder of Wellplaece, a dental marketplace and procurement service that utilizes AI to get dental practices the best prices on supplies.
He recently connected with Becker's about the startup and what the company plans to do with its most recent round of seed funding.
Question: Why did you decide to go with a startup in dentistry instead of any other healthcare industry?
Caen Contee: I look at the dental industry as the market that is indicative of where private and multipractice group healthcare is going, and it's the right time, right place to ultimately scale up. What has been a traditionally fractured market to now one that's across private equity, rollups and franchising is becoming a lot more unified. I look at it as we're really going after private healthcare and approaching groups. Because of my background I did a lot of supply chain and logistics, I had familiarity with that — not necessarily for healthcare but in similar types of procurement needs, and then I started to volunteer during COVID with supply chain issues and just realized how much there was still an opaqueness, lack of transparency and no data. To me there is a fundamental need to create transparency, to create best pricing, to create basically what is now known as current business practices in other industries here. Personally, I've been active in sustainability and healthcare my entire life and I see this is a bit of a combination thereof.
Q: What sets Wellplaece apart from other dental marketplace suppliers, and what are some different aspects that you are bringing to the table?
CC: First off, we don't really look at ourselves as a marketplace, we look at ourselves as a procurement software platform that is really enabling practice care. There's been a lot of software focused on patient care and enabling you to better optimize your top line, but I think what's happening now, especially with dentistry being about the patient and single dentist to now about the business just as much as the care, and that transition to being about the care on the practice side means that dentists don't want just a better way to order. They want a way that gives them data, a dashboard of what they're ordering, see that against the budget, allow for that to be seen in comparison to what one of their offices has been ordering versus the other 20 on certain products. We give them all of that visibility for this new phase of running a business that is multisite. I think if you look at what we do uniquely, we don't charge practices. Our whole feeling is that we're giving them a service and then we're working on behalf of suppliers to bring them a deal, and you immediately start to save 20 percent to 30 percent. We then give you data for all of your orders in a way where you don't really order through us. What you do is you make a request for what you need and then what we uniquely do is we have an algorithm and can search hundreds of different pricing sites to see what is the current best price for that product, and if you're open to it we also suggest alternatives or substitutions that you could buy instead. We do all the work for you and we give you one invoice, so all invoicing aspects of having to handle multiple suppliers are gone. You have us as one supplier to many so it simplifies that for you.
Q: How does the data and software get implemented at the practices?
CC: One data set we have is simply a universal product catalog. Right now we've made one of the largest dental product catalogs by basically looking at catalogs from across the most well-known distributor suppliers and then putting that where you can now see all it in one place, and then allowing for that catalog to then be matched to substitutions. The data goes with the product catalog alongside the pricing data, which is in real time, and we can take from each of the suppliers' portals, meaning that now we have a catalog which is comparable against real-time pricing. We now also have additional data sets of ordering behavior. On the proactive side, with some of our practices where we have almost six months of data, we actually have a pretty good idea of when they need things, and when they're running out so we can ultimately pre-order supplies. We're now also beginning to plug into patient management software, and we can actually see a patient schedule — what are the treatments that you have scheduled for next week, next month and three months out — and we can estimate based on treatments. You now suddenly have that data for cash flow financing and for understanding how to optimize your business.
Q: How is the seed round funding going to help build out and improve the service, and what are your plans to utilize the funding?
CC: Demand has not been our issue, so we need to ramp up the team to be able to meet the demand. Part of that is simply allowing us to have the products to be where we need to be to automate and then the team side, scaling up and going from hundreds to now thousands of practices. It's less on the sales or developing the marketplace side, and more for the demand to be well-handled with great accounts, executives and service, and then moving a lot of what has been when we started more manual work to more automated. We're moving forward in every aspect of the business of trying to make those workflows ones where there's a logistics automation that doesn't require human involvement.
Q: What is your ultimate goal for the service in the future?
The way I look at it is that there should be a comprehensive practice care out-of-the-box kit. If you're deciding to run a group, you want to make sure you have services and supplies, and not just for dental. This is for any of the private healthcare groups, because all of these have similar needs, and we see ourselves becoming the easy solution. Bring in all of your data sets from your accounts payable system, your patient management software, your suppliers and now you have a hub that makes all the efficiencies that much more detailed and specific to how you want to run the business.