Could AI transform how we care for pets?

Welcome to The Opportunity, the new podcast from Sifted and Unleashed by Perina about pet tech's biggest bets. With pet adoption booming during the pandemic, the tech that helps us care for our furry friends has become a huge global market. Last year it was valued at $6.3 billion and it's projected to grow even further. It's a big investment opportunity that spans beyond pets too. This week we are diving into artificial intelligence. Could the hottest tech in startups help us care better for our pets? And what are the risks of potentially shifting caring responsibilities to robots? As I mentioned earlier, pet ownership soared during the pandemic. White collar workers cooped up at home and isolated from friends and family turned in their millions to the companionship of furry friends. According to PDSA, there was a 36% increase in pet ownership in the UK during the pandemic. And tech capitalised on this increasing market, offering up new and wonderful ways to monitor your furry companion's health once and well-being. However, things have changed since the pandemic in 2021. Workers are increasingly back to the office and social obligations are back big time. This has led to a bit of a paradox where pet owners are way more in tune with their pets, caring for them more like family members and friends, but also want fun and active social lives, which don't always go hand in paw with staying in with your peach. Could tech's new darling artificial intelligence come to the rescue? From AI-powered smart collars and litter boxes to using AI to figure out your cat's emotions, pet care is becoming more and more high-tech. Given there are so many more pets around, one of the biggest problems for owners is finding a vet. In May last year, UK MPs even raised concerns over the UK's vet shortage. We wrote about Looper, a London-based AI startup in the last PetTech newsletter, details for signing up are in the show notes, and its recent $4 million raise to solve justice problem. Niccolò Frisiani is the founder of Looper. As I mentioned before, the UK is facing a shortage of vets, and the vets that we do have are using outdated tech. That shortage has always been a little bit of an issue, but since COVID 2020, it has become a real problem. The number of pets since 2020 has grown dramatically, and obviously the number of vets didn't really keep up with the growth. It takes a while to become a vet, and so we landed into a situation where really there is a pretty intense shortage of vets to service the demand. And the big issue that we see is that vets in UK are using solutions from really 20, 30 years ago. Very clunky, inconvenient, old-school way of invoicing medical records appointment management, and then they rely on a whole constellation of plugins that try and bolt onto these really old-school pieces of software, but which make the entire setup really inefficient. You know, some practices you'll see have like three, four different calendars where the receptionist has to manually sync between them because they'll really talk to each other because integrating on top of a piece of software from the 80s and 90s is really complicated. And obviously the problem with this stress and tech not addressing the stress causes the largest issue that we have right now in the industry, which is veterinary retention. The average tenure of a vet in the industry has gone down dramatically in the past few years. Looper is an AI-powered veterinary operating system, or VETOS. So first and foremost, yes, it's a veterinary operating system, right? So what that means is the one piece of software that helps run a veterinary clinic. So a practice management software, but with a bit of the whole ecosystem of things around it to try and help make it efficient because it all lives in one place. Part of the efficiencies is the fact that it's all in one operating system ecosystem. The other big part is the fact that we use a lot of AI. So the way we built this is we have our operating system has a little AI co-pilot called Jerry that appears in a lot of different places throughout the system that tries and automate things. So our most used feature for Jerry is the AI note taker. The AI note taker is what you imagine. It records the consults and the entire conversation between the vet and the pet owner. It takes out all the unimportant stuff and it summarizes the medical things into a medical format of notes and then has a few funky features on the side where you can convert those notes into a take home letter. It can translate that take home letter into a different language, et cetera, et cetera. Then Jerry appears in a lot of other places to try and automate that. I think the second most used feature is the medical record search right now where vets spend quite a bit of time when they get a patient that walks into the consult room scrolling through medical history to try and find out whether they had a certain vaccine, whether they had some other diagnosis, what the actual history of this pet is because they likely haven't seen the pet in a year. That effort we try and automate a bit by having Jerry read through the medical history, write out two, three bullet points at the top of the appointment file about the key things are so that the vet starts the appointment and knows what's happening before having to scroll through a 20 page PDF of medical history. Really what we're trying to do is help automate things. Looper has onboarded multiple clinics already and secured a partnership with Vetshore, the UK's largest vet buying group with over 1200 member clinics. So Vetshore has been amazing both in terms of giving us feedback on solution, how to improve it and also in terms of pushing us and making their network excited about our solution. There is still room for us to grow. We have just developed this, right? We feel like we've been doing it for years but in reality we are by far the newest kid on the block. So there is definitely still a lot of improvement that we can do to the system and a number of our clients have been extremely useful in telling us what to do, how to do it, what to improve, what to prioritize. Looper has recently raised a $4 million seed round from investors like First Minute Capital, bringing its funding up to $5.2 million. The reason we actually went into fundraising the first place is we had started towards the tail end of last year accumulating a pretty long list of clinics that wanted to come live and the wait list was getting longer and we didn't have capacity to onboard all of them and to service all of them. And so part of the raise was that we can grow the team and actually service them, right? And that's done now. The team has grown quite a lot and we now have capacity to onboard a lot more clinics at once and importantly to keep servicing and give customer support to the clinics that we have onboard. The round ended up being quite large. We got quite lucky. We found some really good investors. And so then I think now we have to do two more things I would say over the coming year. Coming out to the whole industry, Nicolò thinks AI could change up how we care for our pets significantly. However, when it comes to taking insights and putting them into human health care, Nicolò says vets are most likely behind. I don't know that the veterinary industry is actually more technologically advanced than human doctors. I think from what I've seen, if anything, it's often the other way around. I mean, you would expect the vets to be able to at the forefront of innovation on this kind of stuff because they have less regulations than human doctors do. But then in reality, I think there is also often less willingness to spend from large organizations in the veterinary industry and in the human health. Also working on the problem of the shortage of vets is Italy based item, the developers of Leica, an AI powered veterinary assistant for diagnostic guidance. Masi Milani-O-Mellis is the Chief Technology Officer. Hi, nice to meet you. Leica is, of course, named after the famous dog. It is. There is a meaning behind. As we know, the dog actually didn't have a nice fate in that case. Our idea was basically to have a new life for Leica, thanks to technology. And this is why basically we wanted basically to have Leica reborn, thanks to artificial intelligence becoming the best friend of the veterinarian in order to save more and more pet's life. Leica has been designed to support every phase of the clinical process. Yes, so Leica can be introduced in any point of the workflow of a clinic. It can be used at the beginning of the freeage when the front desk is receiving the pet. It can already start using Leica in order to have an initial symptom check and basically some initial differential diagnoses that are coming from the analysis and from the input that the pet owner can provide. Then, really, the game changes when Leica goes into the end of the veterinarian because, as we all know, the veterinary field is affected by burnout, a lot of work to do, a shortage of the personnel. And so, really, AI and Leica is there to help them decreasing the time spent maybe on treating a case, to focus much more on the pet. And practically, basically, veterinarians can interact with Leica, asking information about the potential differential, asking bulk analysis of several documents, imaging, having urine, what whatever kind of sample of analysis Leica can provide you a summary and also propose the differentials and then provide nutrition plans and so on. Leica has some impressive stats. A 17.5 reduction in consultation costs and a 10 second average response time. Leica is not there to somehow replace the work of the veterinarian. She is really there to save the time of the veterinarian, so suggesting as if she is a colleague, let's say, and an assistant, but in order to save time. And we made a study with roughly 500 clinics to get the stats that you were speaking about. The results are impressive, so they can cut costs because they decrease time and they can spend a ton on what is worth it. And the technology is created by vets, for vets. Really, what we did was to create this technology in order to solve a pain point. I am an engineer. Usually engineers fail on one thing. We fall in love with technology and we are not solving a concrete issue, a concrete pain point. Our mantra since the beginning was, let's find a way that the eye can help veterinarians, solving their pain point. And so basically, we must ourself into clinics. We spend more than six months in clinics labs and so on understanding which were the process process, how they were working. And basically, thanks to the feedback that we had from veterinarians, we improved the product. And when we launched the before of actually launching commercially, we wanted to start with a beta phase where we involved several clinics on a six month beta, where basically every week we were collecting feedback in order to iterate in the product in order to come to what we have today that is like, that is really solving an issue. And so this is why it's from vet by vet. Dr. Nick Nicolò, Massing Millanio thinks there are big opportunities for AI in PetTech. Imagine using AI for improve the booking system for scheduling meetings with the donors for maybe working on the revenues of a clinic. Financial pressure is one big issue. Usually veterinarians maybe are not even trained for this. AI can help in streamlining also this part of the work and summarizing the task in the vet recordings with the describers. So really, I just see this technology becoming really pervasive so that the ultimate result will be that the veterinarians can save time so that they can really focus. While Looper and Item are focusing on helping vets in their practices, other startups are looking at tech which can be used at home to alleviate some of the pressures on vets. Susan Groneveld is the founder of Sylvester AI, a Canadian startup which uses AI to analyze photos of your cat's face to assess whether it's in pain. So say I've got a cat and I'm concerned it's in pain but I'm not quite sure because I can't talk to it and ask. Susan says her app can see whether I'm right. You know it's interesting because right at the premise of it is most people don't want to know if their cat is in pain. And so we actually created this technology to help people know if they may be in pain. This sounds like a nuance of words but what we know about cats is they're 10,000 years less domesticated than dogs and so they mask their symptoms of pain. And in fact, that's largely why a lot of people like them as a pet is they are thought of as needing less care. And so when a cat is demonstrating health issues, they will go hide, they'll go in the back bedroom, they will pee on your pillow or outside the litter box. And so we know a majority of cats get surrendered because of behavioral issues and a lot of those are associated with health. And so the question I would preface it with is why is my cat being a jerk? And so then we take a picture through somebody's phone of the cat and we actually use validated veterinary pain scales that's used and we've applied AI to it and so visually we can do an assessment and say with a confidence level that this cat may be in pain. And if it is in pain, we have a quick little symptom checker and we're trying to encourage the pet caregiver to then seek professional help for the cat or track over the time or just know that they're doing a good job because their cat is healthy and happy. And of course, there are questions of whether this is accurate and whether there are risks to relying on this tech. It's a really interesting conversation to have and I'm going to talk about veterinary validated scales right now. So those are subjective scales that vets can use to measure different parts of the cat's face. We've applied AI to that subjective level. So already our technology because of the number of cats that we've assessed which are in the tens of thousands is more accurate than a veterinarian, two veterinarians, two people were already more accurate because we're one bias rather than everybody having a bit of a bias. But on the pain scale itself, the way the pain scale works is it's a ranking from zero to 10. When a cat is scored at a level four, it's required from a veterinarian point of view to provide some kind of pain management for the cat at that the score of four or higher. And we are 89% accurate to a cat that's been scored four or higher on the validated veterinary scales that exist today. So we're highly accurate with assessing pain. Three or under is we're as accurate as humans are because it could be just like one year up or they just woke up or they're cranky. So zero to three is still pioneering but pain assessment, we're highly accurate. So far, Sylvester AI has received $778,000 in funding. So what's next for us is we are integrating. We're scaling revenue now. So we have a contract with your free, which is approximately 600 clinics globally. And then we have two other imminent integrations that I can't talk about right now. But basically our ecosystem will be over 1000 beds. It's an exciting time for us. So there's work being done already in nonverbal dementia patients actually at a Glasgow, using the grimace scoring from an AI point of view to help nonverbal human. There's scoring that exists for babies, but I don't know AI has been applied. And then in terms of species, there's work already being done in this area for us anywhere where the face is highly accurate, the grimace. So equine, ferret, rabbits, mice, it's highly accurate, dogs. Everyone asked me about dogs. Dogs is more complicated because they have a mirror effect to the human. They've been domesticated to please us. And so they might also pretend that they're not in pain when they're in pain. And so that would be a full body approach. But we're going to be seeing, we're just going to be seeing an explosion. We're working with universities around the world. And we're going to see a massive explosion of opportunities. And I think it's important to note that we are pushing with applied AI, meaning we've taken it out of an institutional setting and we're actually commercializing, which is a really unique use case to get the ball rolling for AI. Given these solutions are so easy to integrate into pet ownership, Susan predicts more smart tech will be used in the future as AI gets smarter. I'm saying to my husband, you know, like when we were starting, I'd say pre unleashed, I would get an exciting conversation with a group that was interested in the technology. And this would be multinationals to integration partners to veterinary clinics, maybe three a week. Now it's like five a day. So what is shifted really is that people understand how AI works because we're using it in our everyday like Gemini, chat, GPT, perplexity. So people understand the role of AI. And there is going to be no industry that is left untouched. This is bigger than subscription models. This is like the internet coming or the computer. And so we're only going to just see more use of AI in terms of what we're doing in this arena. Some of the conversations that I'm having now, even with companies that are based on molecules or even nutrition based companies, is that the conversations that we're having now are about business models. And so what is AI really doing? They're transforming business models. And so it used to be a linear, you know, my pet has a problem, I go to the vet or, you know, I want to use this food, it was very just one way. And then we had like this dialogue with apps. And now it's really what we're talking about is putting the species in the middle and making it species centric. Because this is a nonverbal species and we have tools like ours that can give them a voice in their own care. And we know the owners and the caregivers and the professionals were all deeply invested in doing the right thing for the animal. And so profoundly, we're going to see profound shifts. If you're a company that isn't using AI today, you will be in the future. And so I think what I'm also hearing is that if people don't have a strategy around it, they're going to get left behind. That's a really open ended point of view, but I'm seeing it change like 180 degrees from this time last year. Would you care for your pet using AI powered tools? Thank you to all of our guests and thank you for listening to the podcast. Do let us know what you think of the podcast at [email protected] and subscribe to our unleashed newsletter at unleashedsifted.eu.