The Price of Pearly Whites 🦷

March 24, 2022

The Daily Stack is a daily private market insights newsletter by PrivCo, a private company intelligence platform. Read our previous insights.
If you have friends who would enjoy reading this newsletter, please forward this email to them.

My current guilty pleasure TV show is season 4 of the British reality tv phenomenon, Love Island. On the show, the UK's sexiest singles, who seemingly created the Instagram influencer aesthetic, spend months in a luxury villa forging partnerships and breaking hearts. Through this televised exploration, I arrived at the topic for today's Daily Stack -- veneers -- which all the singles on the show seem to have, in antithesis to the British reputation for bad teeth.

Exhibit A: Contestants on Love Island with dental work
Looking at our database of private companies, we see more than headline-grabbing NFTs and "Uber of X" start-ups providing sustainable earnings for their VC owners. Dental work, or the business of pearly whites, is a booming industry and has been since it extended our life expectancy. Nowadays, the industry is not just prolonging the years we can adequately chew our food; it is also one of the most popular cosmetic procedures, possibly because of its link to better success in romance and business.

Glidewell Dental is what Jeff Bezos would have created if he had sold dental implants instead of used books. The company has been polishing its set of offerings since 1970, generating over $1BN in annual revenue.

InBrace and Get-Grin are just two of the many orthodontics brands raising cash. Enable Dental focuses on serving special needs patients in alternative settings. Then there's Overjet, a start-up about to use $43MM in new funding to expand its tech optimization for dental businesses.

For more on this topic, search companies or fundings using the keyword "dental."