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Nick Greenfield, Co-Founder & CEO, Candid

Nick Greenfield: Promoting Wellbeing of People by Redefining Oral Health Using Modern Technology

High-quality orthodontics should be affordable and accessible to everyone. It was this idea that inspired Nick Greenfield to start Candid, a company that is redefining oral health by using modern technology to help deliver human-focused care.
Nick’s skills really lie in pinpointing what’s missing from the current market offerings, finding solutions to the problems with those offerings, as well as bettering their own offerings, and scaling strategically and sustainability. He has always been a pioneering leader who keeps on finding superior solutions to everyday plights.

Nick’s career journey began at Lyft, where he was one of the first employees. There, he helped launch the service in eight markets, from San Francisco to Washington DC. Since then, he has been involved in a number of start-up ventures throughout his career, including Paribus (acquired by Capital One), where he served as COO for two years.
Shortly after co-founding Candid in 2017, Nick helped start Redesign Health: a venture studio focused on building the next generation of healthcare companies. It has raised $250 million since its inception and has 25 companies and counting in its portfolio that has been ideated internally and launched from scratch.

Facilitating Exceptional Orthodontic Care

Candid is on a mission to democratize safe and clinically superior dental healthcare and facilitate straighter, brighter, healthier smiles across the country. It believes that everyone should have access to exceptional orthodontic care no matter their location or socioeconomic status.
Candid works exclusively with orthodontists and has developed technologies that allow it to offer outstanding remote care, reduce the need for multiple in-office visits, and drastically cut down on the cost of treatment.

Delivering High-Quality Orthodontic Treatment at Affordable Cost

Nick mentions that historically, orthodontics has been an expensive in-office treatment, often not covered by dental insurance. But Candid is reinventing orthodontics to be accessible and affordable without compromising on patient care or clinical excellence.

Candid does it largely through its AI-driven CandidMonitoring™ telehealthcare solution, which allows orthodontists to check in on the progress of their patients’ teeth remotely, at anytime, anywhere to ensure that their teeth are following the course of the treatment plan.

Candid is leading the industry by allowing orthodontists to deliver excellent care without the additional hassle and cost to the patient. Its telemedicine delivery system has allowed it to be a leader in delivering high-quality orthodontic treatment at a price point that is much more accessible to consumers without sacrificing quality.

Most recently, the company launched CandidPro: its “orthodontics-as-a-service” offering designed specifically to help dental and orthodontic practices drastically increase their number of the new case starts while generating the single-most profitable per-chair-hour procedure. With CandidPro, Candid is able to bring its learnings from DTC into the dental practice to offer low-cost, accessible, and affordable clear aligners to patients geared in remote monitoring.

Building Business Ripe for Disruption

As the first-ever orthodontist-directed telehealth company, Candid is building a fairly new type of business in an industry that is ripe for disruption. It has had the opportunity to make its own rules and build a team filled with folks who possess an undeniable passion for the work on both an individual and company-wide level.

Candid values out-of-the-box thinking, determination, and desire to do more. “We have seen this play out in a number of ways, including employees driving hours out of their way to meet with doctors in the Candid network or a group of colleagues traveling down to Mexico City to visit our philanthropic partners at Smile Train, all to get that in-person experience and interaction,” says Nick. Candid’s team members throughout the company take on this responsibility to learn, without prompt, to pursue their own passions and interests.

Updating Both Clinical and Experimental Aspects of Technology

As a telehealth-first company, the bulk of Candid’s care is provided remotely. Therefore, the company relies on its advanced technology to support its orthodontists and patients through each clear aligner treatment. When patients come into Candid’s studio, it utilizes a cutting-edge dental imaging system that simultaneously records 3D, intraoral color, and NIRI images to get the most accurate information possible to create its 3D-printed aligners.

Candid’s remote monitoring technology is unlike anything else on the market – it utilizes a patent-pending remote monitoring system (CandidMonitoringTM) and its CandidApp for patient-doctor communications and tracking treatment progress. It continues to update both clinical and experiential aspects of the technology to ensure patients are achieving the best possible outcomes and emerging their most confident selves.

Providing Affordable, Safe, and Superior Dental Healthcare

From the very beginning, Candid’s goal has been to provide affordable yet safe and clinically superior dental healthcare. This is because it did not believe the options available on the market were meeting these standards – they were either less effective but affordable or highly effective and extremely expensive.
Candid does not believe that patients should be excluded from high-quality dental healthcare based on location or socioeconomic status, especially since our oral health can greatly affect our overall health, primarily the respiratory and cardiovascular systems. So, the company’s goal has always been to be that change in the industry by giving anyone and everyone access to its care.

Expanding Range of Products and Services

Nick expresses that there are a lot of opportunities for innovation and growth within both the dental care and telehealth spaces, and he has a lot of exciting plans for Candid, including a few strategic partnerships and expanding its range of products and services.
Candid has more studio location openings in the works and plans to one day expand beyond the US to bring its methodology to the global market.

Advice to Emerging Ones

In his advice to emerging entrepreneurs and leaders, he says, “Starting a company is all about learning from your failures to make the product better. If you have an idea, test it out. Look at the market and ask ‘Does this exist already?’ and if not, determine whether there is a hole in the market that needs to be filled.”