Scaling Smiles: Dezy’s Single-Specialty Play

Healthcare as an industry is probably the single most important out of them all. Yet, it attracts a fraction of the talent as others. And its because healthcare needs more wins, or at least more coverage of those wins. While fintech celebrates Zerodha and Groww, and e-commerce has its Zepto and Zomato, healthcare's success stories are harder to find. We set out to change that by unearthing the industry’s most inspiring wins – starting with Dezy. What began as a simple interview evolved into a lesson in healthcare entrepreneurship. So, dive in for a five-year-in-the-making playbook on building a single specialty chain carefully distilled into a crisp ~1,000-words.

Why Dezy?

Our choice was deliberate. In our predictions piece, we flagged single-specialty healthcare as a rising trend, and Dezy brings that vision to life. Launched in November 2019, Dezy is a fast-growing dental chain with technology at its core, spanning India and the UAE. Operating over 30 COCO (company-owned, company-operated) clinics, it’s a full-stack player—owning infrastructure and operations—and has served 100,000+ customers to date. Backed by over $30M from Sequoia, Alpha Wave, and Chiratae, Dezy proves our thesis in action.

Identifying the Problem Opportunity

While Hitesh’s brother and now co-founder, Jatin, was completing his dentistry degree, they both realized the problem of an extremely fragmented dental market leading to patient dissatisfaction. 

On the demand side, patients faced

• Fragmentation: 99%+ of the market is unorganized.

• Dental Anxiety: Patients faced unpredictable costs, unclear treatment timelines, and no outcome guarantees.

• Lack of Pricing Transparency: Dental care is low-frequency but high-ticket, forcing consumers to “window-shop” across providers with many walking away after finding out costs 

And on the supply side, dentists had to deal with:

• Oversupply: Private dental colleges have oversaturated the market (WHO recommends 1 dentist per 7,500 people so roughly ~187k and India has around 350k dentists)

• Distribution Skew: 90% of dentists practice in metros / Tier 1s leading exacerbating supply surplus

At the same time, players in the West like SmileDirectClub and Dandy were proving specialty care could scale, drawing VC interest. Unlike general medicine, dentistry is 90% procedure-driven, which nicely lends itself to standardisation. Digital diagnostics were being welcomed by early adopters and giving an entry point into full-stack SaaS plays. With demand, supply and macros aligned, the only appropriate response for the “why now” question was an “are you kidding me?”