How Amarinder Singh's Clove Dental is standardising India's oral healthcare

The startup sets ambitious target, plans to increase clinics to 1,000 and serve 3 million patients annually by FY24

Only 45 per cent of Indians brush their teeth twice a day, compared to the 78-83 per cent reported in countries like China, Japan, Colombia, and Italy, a recent study found. Despite being largely preventable, oral diseases can pose severe health risks.

However, choosing a proper dentist can be an ordeal. Enter Clove Dental, a New Delhi-based startup that aims to streamline the process of professional oral care.

“The market opportunity is tremendous. Dental disease is rampant in the country. Nearly 90 per cent of Indians have some sort of dental disease, yet very few people visit the dentist,” says Amarinder Singh, founder and chief executive officer (CEO), Global Dental Services (GDS) – the parent company of Clove Dental.

This, Singh adds, is due to the lack of proper dental infrastructure in the country. “There was also no standardisation in pricing, quality of treatment, sterilisation protocols, etc. It was a completely disorganised industry,” he says.

With the mission to provide a standardised dental care process for consumers, Singh founded GDS in 2011 – a tech-enabled comprehensive end-to-end dental platform providing products and services for oral health, dental beauty, and everyday at-home care.

GDS operates Clove Dental, the largest network of dental clinics in India. The company currently operates 422 company-owned and managed dental clinics under the Clove Dental banner, spread across 24 cities in 12 states.

Clove clinics are equipped with state-of-the-art dental equipment and managed by a team of over 1,010 highly qualified dentists.

As many as 78 per cent of Clove dentists are women, and 61 per cent of dentists hold advanced Master’s (MDS) degrees in Dentistry. The firm has extensive standard operating procedures (SOPs), standardised pricing, non-commission-based compensation systems, in-clinic audits, peer-to-peer case (treatment) reviews, and an industry-first AI-based chair sterilisation system.

GDS recently also launched a new dental beauty brand called Whistle, which offers customised smile-enhancing solutions including invisible aligners. In addition, GDS operates a third direct-to-consumer (D2C) business offering therapeutic toothpastes and related everyday care products under the Clove banner.

The company also has several B2B businesses including Yarrow Dental Laboratory – a custom dental prosthesis laboratory and xMedco – a dental equipment and consumables distribution company.

“Our older clinics, that have been around for a while, are profitable and are around 20 per cent Ebitda. We have a set of new clinics that are in the early stages, which are not profitable yet…It takes about 10-12 months for new clinics to get to break-even and about 24 months to get to peak revenues. Our new businesses are also currently in the investment phase,” Singh adds.

Aside from boasting impressive scale, the Delhi-based company has also been able to generate substantial investor interest, an achievement Singh attributes to “strong fundamentals.”

Global Dental, last week, raised $50 million in fresh funding from Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), the sovereign wealth fund of Qatar. Before that, in December last year, the company had raised another $66 million in growth funding from Investcorp.

“We had raised $100 million from family offices and high net worth individuals before even approaching Investcorp,” revealed Singh.

With the new funding coming in, the company will ramp up investments primarily in expanding its network of clinics, as well as invest capital in its side ventures as well.

“By the end of this financial year (FY24), we will have around 470-490 clinics. We are then aiming to add 150-200 clinics each year to get to 1,000 clinics in the next four years, and onboard around 2,000 doctors… In four years from now, we are expecting to be a Rs 1,000 crore business,” says Singh.

The company is currently catering to around 50,000 patients a month – roughly 600,000 patients a year, and is looking to take this figure to 250,000 a month – around 3 million patients a year.