“If you can hang around long enough, you’ll win at the end of the day.”

Sulman Ahmed 
Founder, Chairman & CEO
DECA Dental Group
… on perseverance and entrepreneurship in a keynote address at the UT Dallas Draper Pitch Competition.

Sulman Ahmed opened his first dental office in 2008. By 2024, his Dallas-based DECA Dental Group had grown to 200 locations across nine states, with backing from Blackstone. So when the UT Dallas alum delivered the keynote at the university’s Draper Pitch Competition on April 14—where student and alumni founders competed for a record $330,000 in prizes—he spoke from experience.

“Life never goes as planned; embrace when those bad things happen or things don’t go as planned,” Ahmed said. The path to a successful venture is rarely straightforward, he told them—but perseverance is what separates the founders who make it.

Ahmed knows something about launching new ventures. Dallas Innovates recently covered his launch of ToothScience, a clinician-founded oral wellness company he’s called “the first shot across the bow of a dentist-led revolution in whole mouth health.”

At the Draper Pitch Competition, Subah Zaeem, head of global community and partnerships at Draper University Ventures and also a judge, said the quality of the business ideas stood out: “We were not expecting them to be this good. They were supersharp. They delivered.” 

Other judges included Suzy Batiz, CEO and founder of Poo-Pourri and Supernatural; George Brody, chairman of Turbostart; and James Dowd, partner at Waxahachie Village Equity Partners.

Nine teams made the finals across undergraduate, graduate, and alumni tracks—with ideas ranging from AI-powered sales coaching to 3D mapping of radioactive contamination to a noninvasive method for delivering drugs into the brain.

Read who won and what they’re building in our story.

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