Maria Pagès he lived more than 100 years and remarried at 82. Without knowing it, his will to live has been inspiring for his grandson, Sergio Comasthat with his constant memory, the desire to start a new project and the intuition of a great opportunity in the market created Dental Residency seven years ago to bring oral health to nursing homes and centers for people with functional diversity.
He founded the company together with the prosthetist Arnau Hayza and to the dentist Alessandro Marconi, a lifelong friend, who had explained to him how a colleague had begun to attend in the residences in a particular way to clients who might not travel to the dental clinic. Thus, they decided to start up “a company adapted to the client and for a group of people who, for the most part, are not served”.
They began offering dental services in three residences in Catalonia. Today they work with more than 800 institutions throughout Spain and are preparing for the international jump before the end of the year. An expansion that has been accompanied by three rounds of financing, and a fourth that is underway to start operating in Europe.
Dental Residency was born in April 2015 with an investment of 175,000 euros contributed by family and friends. In November of that year, they already made their first attendance. “The reception of the residential sector was incredible and from the first day we have had a lot of work”, explains Comas. In 2018 they closed their first capital increase with which they raised 300,000 euros, “and where two very important partners entered: Ship2Ba Catalan foundation for the acceleration of projects with a high social impact, and EconomistsBAN, the network of bussiness angels of the College of Economists of Catalonia “.
With this economic injection they were able to set foot outside of Catalonia. It was in 2019 in the Valencian Community. In January 2020 they proposed a new capital increase of 500,000 euros. The partners who already had contributed more than 100,000 euros and joined, among others, two large partnersthe investor Pau Marinated and the Madrid family Seligratfrom the automotive world, who led the operation with a contribution of 300,000 euros.
Six months without activity
“We opened round on January 21, 2020 and we got half a million euros with the idea of starting the expansion throughout the Spanish territory, but the covid arrived. From March to September we were closed and with some months of negative invoicing because, unfortunately , we had patients with treatments in process who lost their lives. The round we had done at the beginning of the year helped us, in part, to be able to hold on, “he recalls.
Starting in September, they began to work once more and with much more force both on the demand, “for 6 months the residences had been unattended”, and on the strategy, “confinement, like many, helped us to think, rethink the steps to follow and improve the technology”.
In this way, they inaugurated 2021 with a new round of financing. “We aspired to get 600,000 euros and we ended up reaching 850,000 euros. Many of the current partners participated once more and we got partners like the family Puigthrough Lavanda Ventures, and as the company Clerdent, an important group of dental clinics in Andalusia, with Ishmael Cherry in front”.
With this new capital inflow and a turnover that in 2021 has tripled to 1.1 million euros, in October they began to provide services in Galicia, the Basque Country and Navarra. They are ready to enter Madrid and Andalusia in the coming months and they are very clear that in 2022 they will operate in the European market, where more than 4.4 million people live in residences and require adapted health benefits.
“Germany, France, the United Kingdom and a part of Italy are our main objectives. At the moment, we are assessing whether we land in all the countries at the same time or do it one by one,” advances the co-founder of the group. And in order to carry it out, they are working on a new capital inflow. “We estimate a new round of between 3 and 5 million euros. We have detected a lot of interest.”
They have also invested in mobile units, which are like an ambulance converted into a dental box, “with the same philosophy: to bring the clinic closer to the client”. They already have two operating units and the forecast is to incorporate more.
In the medium term, however, commas works with the idea of making Dental Residency evolve into a company specializing in healthcare services adapted to dependency in general. “The people we serve have oral and dental problems, but also hearing, vision, etc. We have to work to change home health regulations and adapt them to the needs of the most vulnerable,” she says.
