AskVet doubles margins from 40% to 80% by operationalizing a decade of veterinary data with Valantor.
Trained on 2 million transcripts, scanned medical records, and consult notes, VERA™, the world's first digital veterinarian, now autonomously handles 70–85% of user questions and powers AskVet's enterprise platform across companion and farm animal verticals.
AskVet, the world's leading AI-data driven animal health technology company, has experienced tremendous growth and a dramatic shift in its business model thanks to its partnership with Valantor. Built on Valantor's Visual Intelligence platform, and powered by GroundX, AskVet transformed from a human-driven service into a scalable, profitable AI-powered platform, operationalized as the world's first digital veterinarian: VERA™.
Founded in January 2014, AskVet had built an extensive database of veterinary expertise over a decade, including over 2 million chats between pet owners and licensed veterinarians, alongside scanned medical records, diagnostic photos, and consult notes. The company struggled to unlock, expose, and monetize the full value of this data goldmine before the advent of generative AI and large language models.
In June 2022, AskVet, like most early-stage companies, struggled to raise capital as financing markets paused investments. Without the ability to raise additional capital, AskVet needed to reduce its operating costs to quickly achieve profitability. That's when the company decided to pivot from a veterinary services business into an AI-driven, SaaS animal health technology platform that fully utilized the data the company had collected for ten years.
It was around this difficult time that AskVet partnered with Valantor.
Why Valantor
Valantor's Visual Intelligence platform was built for exactly the kind of data AskVet had spent a decade collecting: unstructured visual and textual content that no general-purpose AI tool could reliably read, reason over, or act on at enterprise scale. Veterinary records, claim forms, lab results, scanned consult notes, and the conversational data tying it all together. This was precisely the data comprehension gap Valantor exists to close.
"Valantor created foundational technology that allowed us to very quickly and rapidly scale up this virtual veterinarian," explained Cal Lai, Founder & CEO of AskVet. "We couldn't have done it without the underlying technology that we built around Valantor's platform."
Building VERA on GroundX Studio
Valantor's GroundX Studio, the extensibility platform for Visual Intelligence, gave AskVet's team the building blocks to assemble VERA™ without rebuilding core AI infrastructure. Document Plug-ins handled the structure of veterinary records, claim forms, and consult notes. Function Plug-ins composed extraction, classification, and validation into the workflows VERA runs every day. The result was a digital veterinarian operationalized as a turnkey Outcome, not a science project.
More importantly, Valantor's approach to tackling AI hallucinations, by converting AskVet's trove of conversational data, medical records, and visual evidence into trusted, structured, model-ready intelligence, gave VERA™ a foundation of assured intelligence rather than probabilistic AI. "The core of what makes it critical to keep VERA™ from hallucinating is our data layer, where we prioritize our own chat data that we know is accurate," said Lai.
"Moving from human vets to AI has been a game changer for our economics. We're no longer gated by the limited supply of human veterinarians. VERA scales infinitely."
The economics transformed
VERA™ can now autonomously handle 70–85% of user questions without human assistance. This has allowed AskVet to dramatically lower costs and nearly double gross margins from around 40% to 80%. It also enabled AskVet to secure new enterprise clients across both the companion and farm animal industries.
"Moving from human vets to AI has been a game changer for our economics, and for the economics of our animal health clients in insurance, food, pharma, and services," noted Lai. "We're no longer gated by the limited supply of human veterinarians. VERA™ scales infinitely. Our goal is to use VERA™ to help our enterprise partners close the supply-demand gap between the large and growing need for both companion and food animal veterinary care and the limited supply of veterinary expertise."
What's next
With VERA™ getting smarter with every interaction, Lai believes AskVet will soon have "more information about companion and farm animals than any company on the planet." He credits Valantor's platform for AskVet's ability to be first to market in capitalizing on how data and AI can solve the core problem in animal health. "After more than ten years in business, we found the fast-moving slipstream in a very big river. Valantor made it possible to expose the value of our data, our crown jewel, and monetize it."
Having proven the model in the $750B global animal health market, AskVet and Valantor see massive potential to expand the partnership into new verticals like human health. "The sky's the limit," said Lai. "We're going to grow dramatically together over the next 18 months. We will create some ground-breaking technologies that could lead to revolutionary new models for healthcare delivery."