How Modern Animal is using technology to make pet care more customer-centric

“We were definitely inspired by One Medical early on,” said Steven Eidelman, founder and CEO of Modern Animal. “I think Tom Lee, the founder, was really a trailblazer for: How do we bring technology into health care?”

The idea behind both companies was to add a technological element to health care to make the customer experience more seamless. Eidelman described the core problem with veterinary clinics thus: “As a pet owner, you and I both know the experience we have going into a veterinary clinic. And it’s a little bit underwhelming — to put it nicely, the experience is not really customer-forward.”

Eidelman joined this week’s Modern Retail Podcast and spoke about his company’s recent growth and future plans.

Modern Animal, which first launched in 2020, tries to make the experience better by building its own clinics, hiring its own veterinary and technical staff, and using technology to make the entire process smoother. For an annual fee, members can get unlimited access to exam visits as well as Modern Animal’s telehealth platform. It’s currently available in major California and Texas cities, and will be opening new locations in both Colorado and Arizona later this year.

“We offer primary preventative care,” Eidelman said. “We offer urgent care, and we offer our care digitally. We do dentistry, we do surgery. What we don’t do is we don’t do after hours,” Eidelman said.

While the business is health care, Eidelman believes the key to success is thinking about it from a retail perspective. At the end of the day, the core underlying business model that we are building has not really ever been built in the veterinary industry,” he said. “And that is: we are building a retail footprint, a sort of box-driven business.”

Here are a few highlights from the conversation, which have been lightly edited for clarity.

The One Medical playbook
“We were definitely inspired by One Medical early on. I think Tom Lee, the founder, was really a trailblazer for: How do we bring technology into health care? And a lot of what we started with was similar: We had a mobile app; all of our clients are members; and we have 24/7 telemedicine, so you can access us anytime, anywhere. It’s like having a veterinary technician in your back pocket when most practices are closed at night and on the weekends and things like that. To make it clear, we own and operate our own clinics. So we build our own veterinary practices from scratch, we build all of our own software, and then clients are members.”

Modern Animal’s approach to technology
“Technology was sort of part of the core from day one. We started building our own practice management system — which is how we run the practice — [and] our own app. We built all of that on day one, and that has had profound benefits years later — especially now with AI. We’ve been able to leverage a lot of AI to drive efficiency and streamline the work for our team as well as for our clients. But the Covid experience was, … I think once we were out of it and we opened back up, the biggest change that has been lasting is that … millennial and younger pet owners became the largest pet-owning audience.”

Figuring out success in vet care
“At the end of the day, the core underlying business model that we are building has not really ever been built in the veterinary industry. And that is: We are building a retail footprint, a sort of box-driven business. We deploy capital to build a physical clinic, and we have to ramp that [up], both in terms of hiring our team, building awareness in the local community that we serve and having clients join us. And we need to balance that all to make it a profitable, sustainable business. And the better we get at that, the more we can expand so that we can have more impact.”