Ten years ago, I brought home a Bouvier des Flandres named Samson. He's stubborn, gentle, deeply expressive, and very bad at pretending he isn't in pain. A few years ago, Samson was diagnosed with liver cancer. Like most people in that position, I did what any owner who loves their animal does: I went looking for answers. Not blog posts. Not forums. Not vague reassurance. I wanted real medical insight. What are the options? What's known? What's uncertain? What would the best veterinarian in the world want at their fingertips when making decisions for this dog?
I was lucky in one very important way. My brother-in-law, Andrew Heller, is a veterinarian. He helped me navigate the complexity, interpret the literature, and understand what actually mattered versus what just sounded confident. Without him, I would have been lost. And that's the moment that really stuck with me: most people don't have an Andrew in their family. And even veterinarians themselves shouldn't have to rely on heroic memory, scattered sources, or late-night textbook dives to find the best possible answer.
What I learned through Samson's care was unsettling. The knowledge exists, but it's fragmented. Critical information is buried across textbooks, research, and specialties. Veterinarians are expected to synthesize all of it, under time pressure, for thousands of species, often with incomplete data. They carry an enormous cognitive and emotional load, and the tools they're given don't reflect the sophistication of the medicine they practice. Watching Samson's case unfold made one thing very clear to me: this wasn't a failure of veterinarians. It was a failure of the systems around them.
OpenVet was built from that realization. Not as a chatbot, not as software for its own sake, but as a way to unify the collective intelligence of veterinary medicine and make it available when it actually matters. Andrew eventually joined OpenVet's team because this problem isn't abstract to him either. It's personal. Our mission is simple, but not easy: give veterinarians clarity in moments of uncertainty, precision when the stakes are high, and a system that thinks the way they think. Fast, rigorous, and grounded in real medicine. If we do that well, animals like Samson get better care. And the people entrusted with their lives feel less alone in the hardest moments.