🐶😻Petabyte Technology Fetches $8 Million to Mitigate Vet Peeves
Rhapsody.vet helps veterinarians increase operational efficiencies — from diagnoses, procedures, medical records and more.
🙀🙀🙀 It’s official: pets are more popular than kids –– at least in some of America’s most populated cities. Dogs outnumber kids in San Francisco, and cats outnumber kids in Seattle. This not only blurs the line between animals and children, but ups the stakes of one profession in particular: your friendly neighborhood veterinarian.
Recently, vets across the U.S. raised their stethoscopes and popped their white coat collars after Petabyte Technology landed $8 million to modernize veterinary practices that haven’t changed much since the original Dr. Dolittle movie. The Series A –– led by Acrew Capital and followed by Ridge Ventures, Greycroft Partners, and Correlation Ventures –– will beef up Petabyte’s premier offering, rhapsody.vet, a suite of mobile tools that makes life significantly easier on overworked vets and the anxious clients hauling pet taxis into their offices.
The almighty cloud, only used by 10 percent of veterinary clinics, enables rhapsody.vet to streamline every facet of vet life. Scheduling, patient records, billing, prescriptions, and more are all a click or touch away and can be migrated from other software platforms in minutes. As if rhapsody.vet wasn’t already the cat’s pajamas (the dog’s clogs, the bengal’s bangles), the new funding will be used to accelerate its product development and add more superstars to its customer support squad.
The executive team has some star power of its own. Ridge Ventures, like many prospective pet owners, takes a long look at pedigree, and Petabyte passes the test with flying collars.
It starts at the top with founder and CEO Michael Hyman, a serial entrepreneur who’s sold four startups — including Vidible, which Ridge backed in Seed and Series A — and held senior positions at Amazon, AOL, Inc., and Oath (AOL/Yahoo! merger). Hyman’s enterprise expertise is a perfect complement to COO Alex Krooglik, who learned the ABCs of the veterinary care game, including all of its shortcomings, through his co-founding of Embrace Pet Insurance. A major pitfall of many vet outfits is one of Petabyte’s most appealing features: standardizing tasks at a given practice, notably physical exams, to ensure data is properly maintained and everyone is on the same page.
🐕 Of course, we were completely smitten with puppy love at the first sight of the rhapsody.vet software itself, along with its potential to blow open a market begging for innovation. Three decrepit providers control roughly two-thirds of the space, and none of them have spent much dough to spiffy up their outdated products. Rhapsody.net’s fast, sleek, intuitive interface, cloud capability, and flexibility — desktop, tablet, phone — are easily best in show.
Petabyte also announced the addition of new President Tim Mahlman, who previously headed Verizon Media’s ad platform business and co-founded Vidible with Michael. Tim will no doubt help the Petabyte platoon reach their goal of doubling the company’s headcount in 2020.
🐩 🦜 🐈 Lots of excitement, indeed — and barking and meowing and cawing and neighing — at Ridge HQ for team Petabyte. We’re big animal lovers and big fans of the folks who help our furry/scaly/blubbery friends live their best lives.
