How Modern Animal is using technology to make pet care more customer-centric

Most founders are loath to compare their businesses to other companies. Not the veterinary care startup Modern Animal. "We were definitely inspired by One Medical early on," said Steven Eidelman, founder and CEO of Modern Animal. "I think Tom Lee, the founder, was really a trailblazer for: How do we bring technology into health care?" The idea behind both companies was to add a technological element to health care to make the customer experience more seamless. Eidelman described the core problem with veterinary clinics thus: "As a pet owner, you and I both know the experience we have going into a veterinary clinic. And it's a little bit underwhelming -- to put it nicely, the experience is not really customer-forward." Eidelman joined this week's Modern Retail Podcast and spoke about his company's recent growth and future plans. Modern Animal, which first launched in 2020, tries to make the experience better by building its own clinics, hiring its own veterinary and technical staff, and using technology to make the entire process smoother. For an annual fee, members can get unlimited access to exam visits as well as Modern Animal's telehealth platform. It's currently available in major California and Texas cities, and will be opening new locations in both Colorado and Arizona later this year. "We offer primary preventative care," Eidelman said. "We offer urgent care, and we offer our care digitally. We do dentistry, we do surgery. What we don't do is we don't do after hours," Eidelman said. While the business is health care, Eidelman believes the key to success is thinking about it from a retail perspective. At the end of the day, the core underlying business model that we are building has not really ever been built in the veterinary industry," he said. "And that is: we are building a retail footprint, a sort of box-driven business."