Ada Ventures Investment in Tooth Fairy

Along with our friends Slingshot Ventures in Amsterdam, we’re super excited to have lead the £3M Seed round Deepak and Kian at Toothfairy, as report yesterday in Techcrunch. Ada Co-led the pre-seed round, alongside Unicorn factory Seedcamp, last year.

Toothfairy is what happens when two highly entrepreneurial and award-winning dentists decide that technology is the way to deliver high quality dentistry to more people at more affordable prices.

The team started with teeth alignment/whitening, which until now has been done slowly, expensively and (increasingly) unsafely with more DIY style solutions being offered. Toothfairy has developed IP that allows teeth alignment process to be delivered remotely via your phone. This has significantly reduced the time and cost of teeth alignment, whilst also increasing the accuracy and safety provided.

Toothfairy is a dental clinic in the cloud, which has clear advantages during these challenging, locked-down times. Over the longer term Toothfairy’s patent-pending technologies will allow patients to receive an increasing number of dental services from the comfort of their home or workplace. Patients will still visit physical dental surgeries for those treatments that require specialised, in-person equipment. Toothfairy is a platform that empowers dentists to be more efficient with their time, only meeting physically with patients for some treatments, which reduces their practice cost bases.

Founders Deepak (left) and Kian (right) winning more dentistry awards

Why does Toothfairy fit the Ada thesis and what got us excited?

1. Massive global market with no technology-first offering. We have seen tele-medicine enter the healthcare market, with some exciting early success, but Toothfairy is the first UK dental app to be health regulated and operational. Timing is everything in investing, but all the data (search results, Toothfairy’s monthly revenue ramp, etc) is pointing towards something special for Toothfairy.
2. Teeth alignment is an under-estimated and penetrated market. Teeth alignment has mostly been the purview of the wealthier demographics. However, the problem is not just an aesthetic one for an Instagram obsessed world. 70% of the UK have mis-aligned teeth, which can lead to all kinds of physical (gum disease, tooth wear and cavities) and mental wellbeing issues. Toothfairy is on a mission to bring down the costs and increase the availability of this treatment.
3. Dental health has an image problem. Particularly in less well-off postcodes, dental health is often neglected. Visiting the dentist is hard to fit around work (when surgeries are open), and it can be an intimidating experience. 4.5 million people in the UK put off going to the dentist each year because of work commitments. The Toothfairy founders want to change this by building a branded, on-demand service that’s safer, more convenient and more affordable than the current dental surgery product.
4. Founders that are uniquely positioned to pull this off. Deepak and Kian, Toothfairy’s founders, are both dentists with superb reputations and celebrity patient lists. They are also entrepreneurs at heart and and are mission driven to completely revolutionise dentistry so that it works better and more effectively for both patients and dentists. There is a long way to go (this is a pre-seed deal!), but we believe that to achieve a goal like this, you’re better placed with deep experience as dentists. Deepak and Kian have been friends a long time, and that they both left highly successful practices, at such young ages, tells you all you need to know about the scale of their ambition.
5. Customer love. It can be a luxury at pre-seed to have customers (patients in this case) to analyse. However, during DD for this investment, we were able to see patient numbers and revenues that grew each month and customer reviews that were all 5* — https://toothfairyapp.co.uk/patients/

Going Forward

If you have visited the dentist surgery during lock-down, you may picked up on the time it takes to make the treatment room COVID-compliant after each visit. This is crippling many surgeries (20% are at risk of closure today), and presumably can’t go on much longer. Toothfairy is not just here to improve patients lives, but also to provide a platform for dentists that qualify to join the app a better model for delivering dental care. This marketplace-style approach is revolutionary and the scale of what can be achieved by Toothfairy is massive. The founders are in a hurry, and we’re thrilled to be shareholders.