The startup’s mobile-first Rhapsody platform touches every aspect of a veterinary practice, including scheduling, pricing, billing, inventory, medical records, prescriptions, and more. Petabyte executives say only 10 percent of veterinary clinics use the cloud today, with a few low-tech legacy providers serving as its primary competition.
Petabyte COO Alex Krooglik told GeekWire that three providers control about two-thirds of the market. However, these providers aren’t investing heavily in their products, Krooglik said, and their systems are just “glorified point of sale terminals that are essentially on life support.”
“Veterinarians deserve better,” Krooglik said.
The company also offers a migration engine that helps customers bring their old data into the Rhapsody platform within “minutes.” Petabyte has about a dozen customers after soft-launching in September.
A key element of the company’s secret sauce is its combination of enterprise software expertise and knowledge of the veterinary industry. CEO Michael Hyman worked at Amazon in the early 2000s and Microsoft in the late 1990s. He was an executive at Oath, the company created through the merger of AOL and Yahoo, focused on advertising and video, before starting Petabyte.
Krooglik co-founded Embrace Pet Insurance, where he learned the ins and outs of veterinary care. One of the biggest pain points he spotted was the physical exam, and it’s an area Petabyte wants to disrupt.
“Most other practice management platforms ask veterinarians to type in what they observe,” Krooglik said. “In some cases, they write it on a sticky note and hand it to someone else — there is so much room for error and data loss, not to mention lost charges. With Rhapsody, all of the pet’s body systems are displayed cleanly on the tablet and the doctor can simply tap — ears, skin, limbs, etc — and drill down to reach all of the observations they want to capture.”
Petabyte aims to standardize physical exams and other parts of the practice. That makes sure doctors are using the same terminology for drugs, procedures, and tests, and charging the same amounts.
The company has 25 employees based out of its headquarters in Bellevue, Wash., and additional offices in New York, San Francisco, Cleveland and Naples, Fla. Petabyte expects to double its headcount by the end of next year.
The Series A round was led by Acrew Capital with participation from Greycroft Partners, Correlation Ventures, and Ridge Ventures. Total funding to date is more than $10 million.
Tim Mahlman, an entrepreneur in residence at Greycroft and former president of Verizon Media’s ad platform business, has joined the company as president.
Thanks to Microsoft and others, Seattle has become a hub for enterprise software. Petabyte is part of a growing group of Seattle-area startups building enterprise software for specific industries. Other examples include Zenoti, which makes software for spas and salons, and Legwork, a maker of automation software for dentists.
Source: Geek Wire
