What is the story behind GekkoVet?
During my vet studies back in the 90s, I was exhausted by the amount of information and knowledge we as veterinarians had to memorize to pass exams and diagnose patients at the University Hospital.
At the time, there were no digital aids available, not to mention smartphones or laptops. Even now that digitalization has brought benefits into all other areas of our daily lives, we as vets still try to know it all by ourselves. If we don’t know it all, we go read books in a hurry or ask our friends either in person or on digital forums.
We have not requested a fast and reliable way to help ourselves and our patients to get better care within our industry. We rely on ourselves and that makes us feel insecure and anxious, sometimes we even fear the pet parent because we don’t have any backups.
As a person who loves animals, I also feel that all animals deserve the best possible care around the world, regardless of the level of their local vet's education. Today, knowledge shouldn’t have any borders and it belongs to every vet in the world.
What experience did you have before founding the company that gave you the confidence to roll the dice?
The biggest and most important requirement to become a startup founder is to have the courage to take on the craziness. Secondly, it’s important to have soulmates that are just as brave and crazy, both in your team and at home to support you.
My veterinary education and experience in small animal practice have been the basis for understanding the needs of the industry. I have 20 years of experience in the animal health pharmaceuticals and distribution industry to understand the business side. Still, I wouldn’t have rolled the dice just by myself and I believe I have the best possible team and partners to work with me from both the veterinary medicine and business point-of-view.
What do you feel are the biggest stressors as a founder?
My biggest stress is to make the investors realize the need for a global structured database for the animal health sector and its enormous possibilities once it’s gathering real-world data and analyzing it to become real-world evidence.
Animal health Is like the wild west. There are no standards available. This is because there is no government funding in the pet sector and, thus, no requirements for standards.
I’m fighting to make international real-world data available to our vet community. This requires all vets to accept the standards that we have created, and it requires funding to raise awareness of such a thing and its benefits in the long run.
How do you measure success?
Metrics for SaaS (Software as a Service) are naturally the number of users, paying customers, and metrics of usage. As we offer the first-ever clinical decision tool in the veterinary market, I’m also searching for metrics to evaluate the benefit of such a tool in a daily routine. It’s easy to point out the benefits in terms of time-saving, better and standardized care for patients, and less stress and anxiety for vets but it is not that easy to measure them numerically. This is a bigger problem in our industry because we are not used to measuring efficacy and quality in a standardized way.
Have there been any pivot points in the company’s lifetime?
It’s no secret that many companies change their course of action many times during their lifespans. This is true also with GekkoVet. Originally, we had an idea to create an “UBER” service for pet owners, where pet owners could easily locate or call in the nearest on-duty vet.
Secondly, before landing with the current idea – which we believe to be the winning one – we had an idea with HD headset cameras, which could be used in veterinary practice for multiple purposes (backup for new grads, consultation with the expert vet, education etc.) Although we still find these ideas attractive, the current idea we adopted is, according to our understanding, the best and most effective way to enhance the well-being of animals.
Were there any moments when you thought it was all over?
Absolutely! We had our first release coming in a week and had some final testing to be done. Some odd bugs were occurring, and we had to hold the release and dig deeper. We found out that the quality of the coding was inadequate for the release and eventually had to rewrite the code from scratch. It felt like a dead end. It came out positive in the end because we not only got the best-in-class technical quality but also re-designed the user experience to a whole new level.
Can you tell me more about your funding process?
The founders have all invested a good amount themselves. In addition, we have had some early angel investors from the famous "family and friends" section. When we were at the phase of releasing the minimum viable product for a soft launch, we opened up a limited number of key opinion leaders and seasoned start-up experts to invest on a small scale.
Our go-to-market strategy is to build awareness, create advocates, reach acceptance, and be the standard.
Finland as our home country is our test market. The US is the centre of veterinary medicine and the most important market to reach acceptance and become a standard.
Our next funding will be mainly used for market entry in the US. It is somewhat paradoxical how challenging it is to introduce a tool that will tremendously save time and bring efficiency to a super-busy practitioner because there is no time to stop and take in the help. The more resources there are, the faster we can get the message through that digital tool that can streamline your daily work in a way that benefits both you as a vet and your patient.
If we had 10x funding the possibilities would be endless. We vision the tool to become the standard that would cover all therapy areas of all species. It will also be linked to various data sources through integrations to further increase and accelerate the data gathering. These integrations would include practice management systems, laboratory and imaging services (xray, MRI, CT), all animal wearables, such as activity collars, and a pet owner app.
The pet owner app – that we have already developed – is especially interesting as it enables a seamless data flow for the whole patient path in a standardized form. All this will proactively bring the patient-specific differential diagnoses based on the history and findings to the veterinarians.
In addition, with 10x funding we envision the tool to become a platform where every key opinion leader can publish their modules regarding their expertise, say internal medicine of rabbits or dermatology in dogs. They share these modules with the wider veterinary public through the platform instead, or together with traditional publishing. This would mean that all therapy areas and species would be covered by GekkoVet.
This is only the beginning of the ecosystem, where the real-world evidence will accumulate at an accelerating pace, creating a vast data vault that in turn can be used for many purposes – research, drug development, prevention, and education of pandemics – to enhance the wellbeing of animals.
What is the best advice you got along the way that you’d like to share with other founders?
At the start, we only had an idea and we had the courage and craziness to start building on it.
Think about how your customer feels about it and what it brings to her/him and don’t focus on the product features. Nobody buys a car based on rational thinking in the end, the choice is always steered by our feeling about it.
In my opinion, if you are wondering if you should leap on a rational decision, do not take it. If you have a passion to change the world and bring something new and valuable, you’re leaping no matter what. When you feel like there’s no other choice and you need to bring this to the community, that’s when it’s right to do it.
You need to have your mission and a strong vision and an inner fire to give people something. If you don’t have that, this journey will crush you because it’s nothing but uncertainty and risk. It’s never easy to be the first one to build something new.
Business-wise, what I would have done differently would be to focus more on the pre-promotion from the very start before even having a released product. Selling the idea and preparing the market for it would have been wise.
Where would you like to be in 5 years?
I have a dream that all vets around the world would have GekkoVet as their 24/7 backup and support. I hope they would have the confidence that they are not forgetting anything and not being biased by their own experience. They could focus on being vets and examining their patients and would use clinical reasoning in solving cases rather than worrying and searching for detailed information.
At the same time, each vet would be part of a chain to produce real-world data back to the community to further develop veterinary medicine. AI and machine learning will enrich real-world data to produce new science for the first time.
Which other founders or leaders in the market inspire you?
I’d like to mention the key opinion leaders that we have in our Veterinary Advisory Board, who as partners have made a huge difference in how we have developed our product to bring benefits to practicing vets and to the vet med community.
Prof. Jill Maddison from the Royal Veterinary College (UK), prof. Holger Volk from the University of Veterinary Medicine Hanover and Royal Veterinary College, Björn Becker, Mike Petty, and adj. prof. Minna Rinkinen from Helsinki University.
What changes would you like to see in the animal health market?
The first idea that came into my mind is the lack of standards.
On the human side, there’s governmental money and once there are governments involved, then they need to have requirements and standards, and everything builds on that. We don’t have this in animal health.
We read books, do medicine, and have our patient recording systems in which we write whatever we want in our language. Then, we don’t have any data to collect because words and descriptions vary, and it becomes impossible to analyze medical history or records. This standardization is one of our core matters.
Everybody wants to have real-world data and evidence, we all agree that we need it, but we don’t have this discussion. That is why we are starting the process.
