Austin startup TeleVet Inc. is doing a lot more than connecting pet owners and veterinarians by video and text these days. So it's changing its name as it moves into its next chapter.
The startup has rebranded to Otto, a bit of play on the company's move into automation. In this case, it's helping automate a lot of the front desk tasks that chew up hours of time for vet staffs. Its platform sits on top of the practice management systems used by vet clinics to manage appointments, follow-up instructions and payment plans.
The company's software will also soon be able to help clinics generate recommendations for pets based on the data collected at individual businesses, Otto CEO Zeynep Young said.
"I wouldn't quite say that it's AI, but it certainly leverages all of the data that's resident in those systems to help the clinic personalize the medical advice and the nutrition that they are giving to their pet owners," she said.
The forthcoming recommendation engine is just one of the innovations Otto hopes to launch following a $43 million funding round that the company announced Aug. 31. The company's early investors, Mercury Fund and Boehringer Ingelheim, were joined by new investor Hill’s Pet Nutrition Inc., a Kansas-based pet food company owned by consumer products giant Colgate-Palmolive Co. Heath Butler, a venture partner at Mercury Fund, will join Otto’s board, and Hill's Pet Nutrition President Nicki Baty is becoming a board observer as part of the deal.
The company was founded in 2015 by Steven Carter and Price Fallin. The new funding comes after a big increase in pet ownership while folks were stuck at home during the pandemic. But Young noted that while the number of pets has skyrocketed, the number of veterinarian clinics and workers have not.
"It's a very stressful job. So we see a decrease in the number of vets that are graduating from vet schools today," she said. "And we see a lot of people leave the profession either through early retirement or reducing their hours. What we're starting to see is sort of a yawning gap between demand and supply."
That, of course, is part of what Otto is trying to address by trimming roughly eight hours a week of administrative tasks for its clients.
"We're really wanting to double down on functionality like ours that streamlines those tasks and allows clinics to personalize care in a more automated way and to really identify additional revenue opportunities for them," Young said. "But also just support staff morale and reduce turnover by reducing some of the repetitive and stressful work that often gets done manually."
Otto declined to disclose its valuation or revenue figures. The company recently launched a care plan, now active in five cities, that allows pet owners to spread out the costs of vet visits and routine procedures.
Otto, which has a relatively new office in East Austin on Cesar Chavez Street, employs 84, with roughly 60 working in Austin and the rest of the team operating remotely. The company plans to hire for tech development positions, as well as build out its sales team.
The startup's platform churns through a ton of data.
"We have 15 million active cats and dogs on the platform," Young said. "That represents roughly about 12% of the total pet population."
But it works carefully with vet offices and allows them to keep their data in house.
"We believe that the clinic's data belongs to them and to their pet owners," Young said. "Our platform does not leverage that data for any use beyond what a clinic needs to do with it. So what we do is allow clinics to create their own automations."
An earlier version of this story misstated the amount of new funding Otto raised. It has been updated to reflect that it was a $43 million funding round.
