The dental industry requires complex and specific products and technologies, but it is not always easy for dental practices to purchase the things they need. CureMint is changing the dental-procurement world with its specially tailored e-commerce platform, designed just for the dental industry.
The Durham-based startup has just finished its seed financing round of $1.25 million, led by Cary’s Cofounders Capital. In just one year, CureMint has grown from 10 to more than 120 customers all over the country.
CureMint will use the funds to grow and scale its product and add to its engineering team so the startup can further the project road map, said Co-Founder Brandon McCarty. He said that they will also put the money towards a “success” team to ensure that customers are happy with the product. Because the dental industry is so tight-knit, the CureMint team also wants to work on getting the word-of-mouth out there through marketing.
Tim McLoughlin, a partner at Cofounders Capital, said CureMint’s dedication to its customer base was a driving factor in Cofounders’ decision to partner with them.
“Brandon and his team focused on the user experience first to ensure adoption, which is what great companies do,” McLoughlin said in a press release. “When everyone in the organization loves using the software, it leads to frictionless onboarding and rapid standardization and ROI for ownership. That combination made it an easy decision to invest.”
What is CureMint?
CureMint’s name comes from the word “procurement,” which is the company’s goal—to procure products for companies through a convenient e-commerce platform. Currently CureMint works exclusively in the dental space, but McCarty said it has the potential to work in any industry.
“We have customers who might have multiple offices,” McCarty said, “and our platform allows them to log into one system to find the supplies they need to serve their patients. Then the management team has better visibility on where the money is going to negotiate better pricing and to centralize payment.”
The difference between CureMint and other procurement platforms is that CureMint is specifically designed for the dental industry, said Co-Founder Christopher Rathgeb. While other platforms are very generic, CureMint was started with a focus on the dental industry and was built specifically to attack the problems that exist within the industry.
In order to buy the supplies they need, dental organizations have to order different products from different vendors who all have different procurement methods. Some vendors may require you to order products over the phone, while others may be online but use a clunky platform.
This process takes away time that dental professionals could have spent with their patients. CureMint gives them this time back by putting these vendors all in one place.
“They can go into one place,” Rathgeb said, “buy from all of the vendors they buy from, and do it just as if they were shopping on Amazon. And as a result of that, their lives are significantly simpler, and they can focus on helping patients instead of tracking down account numbers and different ways to order things.”
CureMint and Covid-19
Just like most industries, the dental world has been affected by Covid-19. Many dental practices are running on skeleton crews right now due to government shut-downs, and they are not ordering as many products because they do not have as many patients.
But as of recently, with some states beginning to open up again, CureMint has been vital in helping get dental organizations the supplies they need.
“There’s been quite a significant demand to get things up and running,” McCarty said. “They’ve been buying specific PPE products, different things to make the experience safer for the patients. Having more vendors and different types of products, managing back-orders has been an up-tick in volume, as they’re getting back in place.”
Because of the nature of the coronavirus, Rathgeb said he thinks it will be more important, now more than ever, that customers know exactly where their products are coming from. CureMint allows them to see that.
“Last week, our support team and success team were on the phone with doctors all weekend, on Saturdays and Sundays,” McCarty said. “They were sourcing new vendors. Vendors that have specific products they need to reopen… CureMint is the familiarity for the customers. They can check out a product, and there’s a sense of comfort with the platform.”
