Success Story: Zahnarzt-Helden

This is Carsten Janetzky, the CEO of Zahnarzt-Helden. He comes from Kiel and founded two other startups before he eventually founded Zahnarzt-Helden. In 2017 he was part of the Founders Foundation team as Entrepreneur in Residence, meaning: he was realizing a project for the Founders Foundation while working on a new potential business idea. And that was the time when the original, first draft idea for Zahnarzt-Helden was born…

How did he end up in the Founders Academy?

As a member of the Founders Foundation team participating in the Founders Academy was practically the “logical consequence”. So he applied to the Academy in fall 2017 together with his friend from university, Philip Pieper, today COO of Zahnarzt Helden with a business and finance background. They both got accepted and teamed up with 3 other participants to work on the idea draft to simplify the purchase of dental devices under the name “Underdoc” back then.

Together, the team really hustled during the 8 weeks of the Academy, did uncountable interviews, built a landing page, measured its traction… and finally pitched at the Final Pitch Day event. And what starts now is more or less the story of Carsten’s life: He pitched the case – and they won. Winning pitch events has ever since been a side track record of Zahnarzt Helden: Carsten won a Startup Night_OWL in Lemgo and also the title as Startup Champion NRW at the NRW Hub Battle in Düsseldorf within only a couple of months.

Carsten is a visionary with strong skills in telling emotional, convincing, catching stories – so the basics when pitching. That’s why today he is supporting the Founders Academy as our pitch coach – so maybe you will get to meet him. But what happened after the Founders Academy? He and Philip kept working on the project while the rest of the team went back to normal life. In their network the two found a perfect third co-founder with Martin Wertgen, today CPO coming from an engineering background, and together they applied to the Founders Accelerator in November 2017 and got accepted. During the Accelerator the final business case developed, they assigned their first customers, collected first investments and founded the Zahnarzt-Helden GmbH. The rest is history: Today they are already outgrowing their second office in Bielefeld city again which makes them one of the fastest growing startups in our network.

So, what do you think?