How Modern Animal is fixing veterinary care for vets and pet owners

Executive overview

Veterinary care is broken at both ends: vets are burned out by impossible working conditions, and pet owners face opaque costs and declining trust. The industry's response — private equity roll-ups extracting value without improving care — has made things worse.

Steven Eidelman built Modern Animal to fix the system from scratch: owned clinics, proprietary technology, a membership model that removes exam fees, and a culture built around the veterinarian's experience. Happier vets, enabled by better technology and a human-centred environment, produce better outcomes for pets and owners.

From pet wearables to veterinary care

• Co-founded Whistle, a pet health wearable, after spotting the millennial shift toward treating pets as family
• Whistle pivoted from health tracking to GPS location after realising the technology couldn't yet deliver on the health vision
• Sold to Mars (one of the world's largest pet care companies) in 2016
• Spent years inside Mars observing the structural problems in veterinary care delivery
• Left to build Modern Animal after concluding the fix required starting from scratch

Why the veterinary system was broken

• Vets graduate with heavy debt, study multiple species, and handle the full spectrum of care — wellness, surgery, dentistry, euthanasia — back to back
• They must negotiate costs with emotionally distressed owners, often becoming targets of frustration
• Private equity roll-ups bought up independent practices promising to "preserve your legacy" while optimising only for economics
• The result: eroding trust, declining vet visit frequency, and a profession struggling with burnout

What Modern Animal built

• Owned clinics (~3,000 sq ft, 6–7 doctors at capacity, ~5,000–6,000 members per location)
• Membership model: ~$200/year removes exam fees entirely; a $99 tier is being added
• Members visit twice as often on average; disease is detected earlier in the cycle
• 24/7 virtual care via app — triage, chat, video — so owners know whether to rush to an ER
• Full pet medical history accessible in the app; booking, payment, and pharmacy integrated

Technology as a strategic moat

• Built proprietary electronic medical records, booking, payment, and communication systems — the sector was dramatically under-invested in off-the-shelf tools
• Owns all data, enabling AI to summarise a patient's full history for the doctor before each appointment
• Weekly product changes rolled out across the network — impossible in a roll-up of disparate practices
• One unified network means every employee buys into the same mission and values

Why they build clinics rather than license software

• Software alone won't change a deeply human experience
• Acquired practices carry entrenched habits; building from scratch ensures consistency
• Every nurse can flag a problem and propose a test — the mechanism of change is embedded in the culture
• Control over the physical environment was chosen for the staff, not for the brand

Founder lessons

• Seek wisdom, not answers — advisors lack the context to make your decisions; accountability can't be outsourced
• The Wisdom of Insecurity (Alan Watts, 1951) reframed entrepreneurial anxiety: the journey from A to B is the point, not a problem to solve
• Inevitability of demand is the signal — if you're pushing a rock uphill, the idea isn't right yet
• Deep caring about a problem, not passion for entrepreneurship, is what sustains a founder through the hard periods