Skip to main content

Deck.blue brings a TweetDeck experience to Bluesky users

With over 3 million users and plans to open up more broadly in the months ahead, Bluesky is still establishing itself as an alternative to Twitter/X. However, that hasn’t stopped the developer community from embracing the project and building tools to meet the needs of those fleeing the now Elon Musk-owned social network, formerly known […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only. from TechCrunch https://ift.tt/TBbEAPF
Post a Comment

Wellplaece wants to put a smile on dentists’ face with new supply procurement marketplace

There are nearly 186,000 dentist businesses in the U.S., and at any given time, they are replenishing supplies. The process of doing so was traditionally fragmented, with offices relying on between three and seven suppliers, on average.

This means someone sits at the computer with tabs open to vendor websites, going back and forth between them, to compare prices and find the best deal. Adding to the issue in recent years was the global pandemic which strained the supply chain and made finding everyday items, like gloves and masks, more difficult.

Caen Contee, founder of global micromobility startup Lime, told TechCrunch that this is an avoidable problem. He teamed up with software engineer Ivan Bertona to develop Wellplaece, an automated, multi-vendor supply product purchasing platform for dental offices.

“Think of the technology like an extraction layer on top of procurement for dental practices,” Bertona said in an interview. “Around optimization, we can also learn about customer habits and what products they might be willing to substitute with equivalent but cheaper alternatives versus which ones they wouldn’t be looking at.”

Here’s how it works: Wellplaece’s proprietary technology digests a client’s ordering data, taking into account specific needs, and then enables the customer to make those specific purchasing behaviors across a large network of suppliers via one shopping cart.

Caen Contee, Wellplaece

Wellplaece co-founder Caen Contee. (Image credit: Wellplaece)

Billing occurs after orders are successfully processed, placed and confirmed delivered. Meanwhile, Wellplaece manages the order and logistics as well as returns and chargebacks as needed. The platform is free for practices to use and Wellplaece takes a portion of the sales it drives to the supplier.

Wellplaece is among other startups, like bttn, helping medical professionals get the supplies they need. However, trying to build something like this even three years ago would have been difficult had it not been for a few factors, including the e-commerce push that resulted from the pandemic, Contee said.

Distributors were trying to sell online directly with an account and with a customer portal. That led to online catalogs where data could be pulled.

“All those things, to me, have created this perfect storm,” Contee said.

Tiger Global backs bttn, leading e-commerce infiltration of medical supplies

Meanwhile, the company began taking orders from a small group of practices in November 2022 and started accepting more practices in a private beta this month. This first cohort of dental practices have already seen 20% to 40% savings per order, Contee said.

In addition, the marketplace has already amassed over 700,000 products across its network of distributors and manufacturers and is poised to onboard over 100 new locations by the end of this year.

Wellplaece’s launch is buoyed by a recently closed $3.5 million seed round, co-led by Eniac Ventures and Bee Partners, with participation from Erik Anderson, co-founder and CEO WestRiver Group; Haroon Mokhtarzada, co-founder and CEO of TrueBill and RocketMoney; Andy Oreffice, former CCO of Affordable Healthcare; and entrepreneur Francis Hellyer.

In total, the company raised $5.5 million that is being deployed into scaling up so it can accommodate thousands of practices waiting to utilize the platform over the next few years.

“A typical practice with two dentists will spend somewhere in the range of $4,000 to $5,000 on supplies monthly, and the least efficient ones may spend up to 10% of their overall budget on supplies,” Contee said. “The most efficient practices may get it down to around 4%. We want to immediately help practices get closer to that more competitive best-in-class range for what they should be spending on their total costs.”

On cloud marketplaces, nobody knows you’re a startup

Wellplaece wants to put a smile on dentists’ face with new supply procurement marketplace by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch



from TechCrunch https://ift.tt/CZtEGTP
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Nimbus launches tiny EV prototype that’s like a motorbike with a roof

As shared e-scooter companies have infiltrated cities and e-bike sales have soared, micromobility has been offered up as a panacea to save us all from the ill humors and packed streets caused by gas-guzzling cars. However, one of the major roadblocks in front of well-intentioned city dwellers who’d love to trade in their cumbersome and environmentally unfriendly vehicles for an e-bike or scooter remains: What happens when it rains? Nimbus, a California-based electric vehicle startup, wants to solve that problem with a simple solution: Put a roof on it. The company recently came out of stealth with a prototype for its Nimbus One, a tiny, three-wheeled EV that “combines the convenience and cost of a motorbike with the safety and comfort of a car.” The Nimbus One. Image Credits: Nimbus The thin, pod-like vehicle is only about 2.75 feet wide and 7.5 feet long, which Nimbus says makes it three to five times smaller than a compact car — the better to park and navigate busy urban stree...
Post a Comment
Read more

Pitch Deck Teardown: Encore’s $3M seed deck

For this week’s Pitch Deck Teardown, I’m (virtually) traveling to Sweden to take a look at the $3 million seed round raised by developer tool startup Encore . The company is creating what it calls a software development platform for the cloud. It reportedly raised from Crane Venture Partners with Acequia Capital ,  Essence Venture Capital  and  Third Kind Venture Capital joining the round. I wanted to take a look at this deck in more detail, in particular, because it tells a really elegant story in a market where it’s extraordinarily hard to differentiate yourself — both to your customers and to investors! Pitching a dev tool in a way that tells the story well enough to understand but without dropping deep into a rabbit hole is a particularly hard challenge, and that’s the needle Encore threads ever so efficiently in this 24-slide pitch deck. We’re looking for more unique pitch decks to tear down, so if you want to submit your own, here’s how you can do that ....
Post a Comment
Read more

Multifamily housing has missed the solar boom. PearlX wants to fix that with $70M Series B

If you’re a renter and you want solar power, you’re usually out of luck. For most, the only option is a community solar program, where people subscribe to utility-scale projects, but they’re not available everywhere. And given that most renters only stay for a few years, which of them are going to pay tens of thousands of dollars for solar panels — and what landlord would let them? That’s where PearlX comes in. “Think of us as like the Sunrun for renters,” said co-founder and CEO Michael Huerta, referring to the company that rents solar installations to single-family homeowners. “PearlX is a rental electrification platform.” Earlier this year, the startup began installing solar panels and backup batteries at multifamily rentals in Texas as part of its “TexFlex” project. PearlX’s next step, which Huerta shared exclusively with TechCrunch, will be a California expansion called “Flexifornia.” The startup is also rolling out a virtual power plant, which will allow the company to tap the...
Post a Comment
Read more