How veterinary care platform Vetster approaches balanced growth

If you’re a pet parent, the internet has likely been your trusted companion in figuring out why your furry friend is acting strange, turning their nose up at their food, vomiting, or…insert approximately 1 million other behaviors and symptoms.

What if, instead of getting a dubious AI response telling you it’s either totally fine or a hair-on-fire emergency, you could quickly hop on a call with a medical professional?

That’s the idea behind Toronto-based Vetster, which was founded in 2020 and has raised more than $40 million to date, per PitchBook. The startup offers a platform connecting pet owners with veterinarians.

The company “sits at the intersection of healthcare, marketplace, and subscription business,” Kristen Johnson, who in May stepped into the chief growth officer role at Vetster, told Morning Brew.

“With Vetster, our goal is to build into that place where pet parents can turn for advice and care and prescriptions and ongoing support,” she said, “from the day that they bring their pet home into every stage of life that their pet goes through.”

Vetster launched at the start of the Covid pandemic pet boom, right as vet clinics were overwhelmed and unable to take non-urgent cases, and telemedicine was growing as a healthcare option. Meanwhile, evolving state regulations are opening up pathways for virtual veterinary medicine.

The US veterinary telehealth market was valued at over $92 million in 2024 and is expected to grow to $600 million by 2034, according to a Precedence Research report cited in a US Chamber of Commerce publication.

Vetster isn’t meant to replace in-clinic vet care, but to supplement it for common ailments that can be diagnosed and treated virtually. The platform, which has more than 6,000 veterinary care providers, claims to have a 97% resolution rate. Users can either pay per appointment, with rates starting at $102, or get unlimited access with a $120 annual subscription.

In January, Vetster launched a virtual vet support program at certain PetSmart stores in the US. The company also offers an HR benefit program to employers.

“We are still an emerging category, we’re still an emerging brand, and it’s going to help with our brand awareness in a way that actually provides real utility and real value,” Johnson said, “as opposed to just going out and buying up media and hoping that somebody remembers that we exist when their pet has a need.”

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

How are you leveraging your marketing background in the CGO role?

When you’re in emerging categories…it’s not just about taking a little bit of market share from a competitor or convincing somebody that maybe your product is incrementally better, but consumers are smarter than they’ve ever been before, and they have more resources at their disposal to evaluate what’s the right solution for them.

And when I think about growth and the power of marketing behind that, marketing is not just about impressions and advertising anymore. It’s really about a holistic experience that’s done in partnership with operations and product and engineering and everybody really having a shared vision of what would be really great for a client experience, to get that flywheel turning.

Because the most powerful brands you see are ones that deliver great experiences, and therefore their clients become advocates on their behalf. And that’s really been central to how I’ve thought about marketing for a long time. And as I step into more of a growth-focused role, it’s taking that philosophy along and making sure that extends across all of our different teams that are working to build Vetster and to build that experience.

Where is veterinary telehealth as a category, and how does that inform your revenue strategy?

It’s still really early. I think the default behavior for a lot of people right now is still, “I’m going to Google it or ChatGPT it or Claude it, or I’m going to go to my vet in person if I think it’s really, really bad.” And when you’re growing an emerging category, you’re not just responsible for awareness of your brand, but you’re responsible for awareness of the category, and being thoughtful about how to actually effect behavior change, which is what gets me really excited.

Our growth strategy has been [about], how do you shape that customer journey, intercept clients where they might actually be indicating that they’re seeking care—so Google searches, long-tail searches…We’ve built a really robust content library to help people access content, because we know in a digital age, especially with younger generations, people want to be a little bit more self-directed. But this is medically reviewed content that veterinarians have been over, that we know has been fact-checked, that you can rely on for some background. And then hopefully that’s going to help you understand that we exist, that we are a credible brand, and that if you do have the need for care, telemedicine is now something that’s actually available to you and your pet, and could be a great first step, especially if you are in that space of, “I’m not sure if this is big enough for me to go in,” or, “I think this is something that could be treated well online.”

If you look at our website, we’ve got a very clear outline of the types of things that we do treat. Because we also want to be really transparent and honest with pet parents [about] what is well-suited for telemedicine versus what should be something that you should be seeking in-person care for. Because we very much advocate for the veterinary perspective and making sure that pets have access to great care, and we never want to be dissuading somebody from going in-person when it’s the right decision for their animal.

What does it mean for you and your team in practice to be doing two things at once: building out a category and growing Vetster’s customer base?

It comes back to understanding our customer really, really well, and ultimately the end user of our pet parent and our veterinarian—and that’s one of our biggest challenges: You actually have to understand both, and sometimes those things can be in tension with one another. You can have a veterinarian that wants to provide 12 out of 10 care, and you can have a pet parent that financially or circumstances or for whatever reason is just misaligned…So we spend a lot of time understanding both of those customer personas, and then thinking about, what are the experiences we need to bring to life through our digital experience to make sure that somebody leaves on either side of that equation being a huge advocate for the brand and the product. So there’s a lot of research and a lot of time that goes into socializing that, not just within the marketing team or within the product team, but our customer experience team is mostly veterinary technicians, and there’s a huge wealth of knowledge that comes from our customer experience team who are actually interacting with both sides of this equation all the time.

We have a really, really big content production part of our business. That’s through video; you can see it on our YouTube channel. A little bit more into Instagram. Long-form content; if you look on our website, we have tens of thousands of pages of symptoms and conditions-based content to help people diagnose…We are still a small business, so we can’t go and spend tens of millions of dollars on a Super Bowl ad or an influencer partnership that’s going to help everybody be aware of us Day One. We have to think more about, what are the right moments to intercept people when they’re indicating to us that they might have a moment of need? And that’s why we have doubled down on what I just talked about—the long-form content, YouTube as a search engine, especially with younger generations. We know people turn to video in a lot of scenarios. And so we have taken our long-form written content and turned it into video platform content, as well, and then trimmed that down into snippets for Instagram. And then our search practices in general: SEO, paid search, making sure that when somebody is typing something into a search engine, or more recently into an AI engine, we are making sure that we show up and intercept in those moments where we’re actually going to provide real value for you, as opposed to just driving awareness for the sake of driving awareness.

As we think about scaling a business in this space, making sure you are the helpful brand that comes in and provides real meaningful value is ultimately how you’re going to win over a customer when you’re building out a category, and building trust in a category where frankly, trust is kind of hard to earn.

How are you integrating AI and automation into your revenue processes?

Our team is very excited about AI. The important nuance there is not just AI for the sake of AI, but AI that’s going to make something meaningfully better…A lot of my job is reviewing things and then thinking about them, and then circling back with a team and providing really thoughtful feedback, and AI is a tool that I can now use on a voice-to-text feature that is actually taking the knowledge that I have, but getting it to my team much more efficiently has made a really big difference. When it comes to our actual product experience, the analogy we used is, if you think about an operating room, surgeons have lights and they have anesthesia and they have all these tools. And we’re thinking about AI as another tool in that sense, where it’s going to help us make better decisions, it’s going to help us be more efficient, it’s going to help us focus on the things that matter, but it’s not there to replace care. It’s not there to replace the human judgment that comes from years of experience and exposure, and so to date we’ve leveraged it for notetaking for our veterinarians. When a veterinarian is on a call with a patient, just like when you have lights that are going to show you your operating table much better, and you can practice better as a result of that, you can focus entirely on the conversation with your pet parent and examining your patient over video call, because you have an AI scribe in the background, noting things down…that is then going to update that into our specific patient record that the veterinarian can then review, make sure is accurate, and ship off to the pet parent. And that’s also going to benefit the pet and the pet parent, because they’re going to be able to get that record way faster than they were getting previously.

Anything to add?

When you think about growth in emerging categories, one of the mistakes I’ve seen is that you measure emerging categories in the same category metrics that you would measure a mature business, and that is usually efficiency, and how do we get efficient acquisition as the primary goal…but in an emerging category, education, learning, and patience for that is equally important—understanding what messages resonate, which use cases drive adoption, which experiences are going to create lasting behavior change. And so the goal isn’t about winning a transaction, it’s really about changing a habit and helping people understand that there is a new, exciting way they can be doing something that they’ve done before.