Scaling Vet Startups Vetster, Dutch, and Airvet Offer Telehealth to Appeal to Busy Pet Owners

A young female cat owner is pictured on a tablet screen talking to a woman veterinarian about the condition of her cat. — As pet owners tighten their financial belts and vet clinics seek growth, three startups are reinventing care through veterinary telehealth, delivering convenience for clients as well as flexibility and new revenue for vet providers. — Getty Images/Krisada tepkulmanont

Why it matters:

The U.S. veterinary telehealth market, whereby veterinarians conduct video visits with pet owners and their pets, is expected to grow at a compound annual rate of more than 20%, according to a Precedence Research report.
Companies including Airvet and Vetster offer veterinary telehealth to employers as a benefit for their workers.
Telehealth also offers a low-cost, flexible practice model for veterinarians

Veterinary telehealth has emerged as a fast-growing platform for animal healthcare, increasingly embraced by both pet owners and veterinarians.

Companies including Vetster, Airvet, and Dutch are all vying for a slice of the expanding telehealth pie by offering access to veterinarians via video visits. These companies and others are also expanding their offerings into related services such as pet insurance and pharmacy, and some are extending their geographic reach overseas as well.

Veterinary telehealth is an industry that has a long runway for growth, these companies say, in part because it offers a convenient solution for the many pet owners who have historically avoided trips to the vet. In addition, many veterinarians have embraced the concept, saying it offers them flexible hours and the opportunity to work from home.

“Telehealth is just another tool for me as a trained and licensed professional to connect with pet owners and their pets and offer the services that they need,” said Dr. Jo Myers, a Colorado veterinarian who is an adviser to Vetster and offers telehealth services to pet owners through the platform. “It’s just a vital part of how we do it.”

The rise in pet adoption during the pandemic, along with its restrictions on in-person visits, fueled the trend toward vet telehealth.

The U.S. veterinary telehealth market size was estimated to be about $92.33 million in 2024 and is projected to grow at a compound annual rate of 20.58% from 2025 to 2034, reaching $600 million by 2034, according to a Precedence Research report.

Meanwhile, a white paper from industry data provider Vetsource found that many veterinary practices are struggling to drive revenue growth after the boom in pet ownership during the pandemic has cooled. In addition, many households have become more cautious in their spending and have cut back on veterinary care. The report outlines the opportunity for veterinarians to engage with their clients digitally.

“Practices should make it easy for clients to do business with them in ways that consumers have grown accustomed to outside of veterinary medicine,” the report concludes, citing online chatting, texting, and emailing examples.

Evolving regulatory landscape reshaping the veterinary telehealth market

In several states, veterinary telehealth businesses are navigating an evolving regulatory landscape.

The American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA), for one, supports the use of telehealth but maintains that an in-person visit is necessary to establish a veterinarian-client-patient relationship, known as a VCPR. In fact, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) generally requires that veterinarians have an in-person visit with an animal in order to establish a VCPR. The FDA also requires veterinarians to establish a VCPR with an animal to prescribe medications for certain conditions.

An increasing number of states, however, are modifying their laws to allow veterinarians to establish a VCPR via virtual visits. California and Florida, for example, began allowing the use of virtual examinations to establish a VCPR last year, and others are expected to follow.

Dutch uses a subscription-based model

The opportunity for veterinary telehealth solutions revealed itself firsthand to Joe Spector, Founder and CEO of Dutch and one of the co-founders of human telemedicine firm Hims (now Hims & Hers Health), after he had to take his pet Corgi Eddie to the vet when the dog ate some chocolate. His $4,000 bill — $2,000 of which was covered by his insurance — was more than he expected to pay for an emergency visit to the vet that he said probably could have been handled with a brief telehealth conversation.

I want everyone to feel like they have a vet in their pocket that they can talk to at 11 o’clock at night at the tap of a button in 15 seconds, and they don't have to go spend $2,000 at the ER just to be told it's not a huge deal. Brandon Werber, Founder and CEO of Airvet

“I just thought, ‘Hey, I did this on the human side. I made healthcare really affordable and accessible, and there’s just no way it needs to be this onerous on the pet side,’” said Spector.

Dutch offers unlimited access to veterinary telehealth for up to five pets for annual subscriptions as low as $132 per year. The veterinarians on the platform are all independent contractors who are paid on a per-visit basis. About half the veterinarians on the platform also have a brick-and-mortar practice, Spector said. About two-thirds of the telehealth visits take place after normal work hours or on weekends.

In addition to its technology platform for telehealth visits, the company uses artificial intelligence (AI) to help vets prepare for visits and compile reports afterward, which streamlines the work that normally occupies a veterinarian’s time, he said. Pet owners fill out a previsit questionnaire about their pet’s condition that the company’s AI tools can analyze to help the vet in their examination and diagnosis.

Dutch has doubled its revenues over each of the last three years and has provided a platform for more than 700,000 telehealth visits since the company launched in 2021. Although the startup has not yet reached profitability, it plans to achieve that goal by mid-2026, Spector said.

“I think that in the next three to five years, telemedicine will be for pets a normalized behavior that is simply another option for pet care,” he said.

The company has received backing from some of the same firms that invested in Hims and Hers Health, including Forerunner Ventures and Eclipse.

Airvet aims for a niche as an employee benefit

Like Spector, Brandon Werber, Founder and CEO of Airvet, launched his company after a firsthand experience with his own pet, a French bulldog named Carlos. The pooch had apparently eaten some asparagus ferns, which are highly toxic for dogs, and became very ill.

Normally Werber would have simply called his father, a veterinarian, for a quick diagnosis, but the elder Werber was out of the country and could not be reached by phone. The result, he said, was sudden panic and the realization that there was a need for all pet owners to have instant access to veterinarians.

“I want everyone to feel like they have a vet in their pocket that they can talk to at 11 o’clock at night at the tap of a button in 15 seconds, and they don't have to go spend $2,000 at the ER just to be told it's not a huge deal,” said Werber.

Airvet seeks to differentiate itself by offering that instant access, rather than having to schedule appointments, he said.

Coincidentally, the company launched just a few months before the pandemic began in the U.S.

“Overnight, every vet in the country had no choice but to quickly adopt telemedicine,” said Werber.

The startup rapidly built a network of thousands of veterinarians around the country who schedule their own hours of availability and conduct visits with pet owners and their ailing pets.

Another key element of Airvet’s strategy was to transition away from offering the service directly to pet owners and instead market it to companies as a benefit for their employees. Now, several large multinational corporations, including Adobe, Activision, Synchrony, and PepsiCo, are among Airvet’s corporate clients that offer pet telehealth to their workers as part of their overall health benefits packages.

Werber said his goal was to make sure that pet owners had free access to veterinarians, and his agreements with his corporate customers ensure that the employees’ costs for using the service are completely covered by the employer. The price paid by each company varies, but in general is based on the size of the workforce.

Airvet has also extended its product offering beyond veterinary telehealth visits to include an online pharmacy for pets and pet insurance policies, and it also has partnerships with other pet-service providers such as dog walkers and pet sitters.

The uptake of the service by employees has helped prove its value as a benefit, he said.

“We’re continually expanding to really be the one benefit that an employer needs to service the varying needs of pet families as opposed to exclusively telehealth,” Werber said.

Vetster COO: ‘It is almost custom-made to address the needs of veterinarians and technicians who have left the profession.’

As the veterinary industry has struggled to drive revenues and cope with a challenging work environment in the wake of the pandemic, veterinarians have been seeking alternatives to traditional models of practice, Cerys Goodall, Chief Operating Officer of Vetster, told CO—.

“This industry has huge attrition rates and lots of stress,” she said. “It’s a very hard vocation.”

Telehealth visits offer these veterinarians a supplemental platform for providing care and also a way for them to observe pet behaviors at home, where there is likely less stress on the animals, she said.

“It’s a way for veterinarians to be able to see pets more often and to be able to catch all the things that might be happening in the home that they aren’t going to see in a clinic,” Goodall said.

Myers, the Vetster adviser, said telehealth offers her flexibility and independence, and for many veterinarians, it provides a relatively low-cost way to enter the practice. In addition, about 68% of veterinarians are women, according to the AVMA, and telehealth can provide the flexibility they may need as caregivers for their families.

Retired or semiretired veterinarians are also attracted to telehealth, Myers said.

“It is almost custom-made to address the needs of veterinarians and technicians who have left the profession,” she said. “It sets up guardrails so that we’re in control, without the capital outlay that it would take to open our own clinic. It lets us use our valuable training and experience to serve the pet owners and pets that we love taking care of.”

Many veterinarians have incorporated Vetster into their busy routines, in which they may work full- or part-time at a clinic and provide telehealth visits during their off hours. The platform allows the veterinarians to set their own rates and allows pet owners to select the veterinarian they want to visit. Vetster collects a small fee from both the vet and the pet owner.

As is the case with other platforms, users can also order prescriptions and have them delivered through Vetster. It also has a team of veterinary technicians who can help with some issues via chat.

Like Dutch, Vetster also offers an annual subscription plan, and like Airvet, the company also offers the service as a benefit that employers can provide for their workers.

Vetster was launched in 2020 by Co-Founders Mark Bordo and Regan Johnson, who both have a track record of creating digital marketplaces.

“This trend is so big because pets are increasingly viewed as part of the family,” said Myers. “Vets would love nothing more than to use their training, knowledge, and experience to meet that demand.”

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