Modern Animal, a pet care service offering 24/7 telemedicine and a more “intelligent” labor model for veterinarians, raises $40M Series B led by Founders Fund
Context & Ripple Effects
Modern Animal's $40M Series B lands in the middle of a sustained venture push into veterinary care delivery that began with FirstVet's €18.5M on-demand video consultation raise in 2019 and continued through LA-based Airvet's $14M Series A in 2020. What distinguishes Modern Animal from those earlier telehealth plays is the pairing of 24/7 access with what it calls a more intelligent labor model for veterinarians — an acknowledgment that the bottleneck in pet care is vet capacity, not just appointment channels.
Founders Fund leading the round also matters for sequencing: the firm's later reported move into later-stage vehicles gave it room to keep backing category leaders, and Modern Animal's model would soon have company — Vetster raised $30M in 2022 and paired its marketplace with a PetMeds partnership for medications, while Otto (formerly TeleVet) took $43M in 2023 to software-ify clinic workflows rather than replace them.
First-order effects
- Modern Animal gets the capital to scale its 24/7 telemedicine footprint and test whether restructuring veterinarian work — rather than just digitizing appointments — can attract vets away from traditional clinic employment.
- Founders Fund takes a position in consumer pet-care delivery at Series B, adding a labor-model bet to the growing roster of vet-sector rounds it now competes against from other firms like Kensington and Mercury Fund.
Second-order effects
- Competitors face a fork in positioning: Vetster and FirstVet built marketplaces routing owners to independent vets, so Modern Animal's employed-vet, always-on model forces them to argue their lighter structure scales better than owned capacity.
- Medication logistics become the integration battleground — Mixlab's vet-prescribed delivery model and Vetster's PetMed partnership show that whoever owns the consult increasingly wants to own the prescription flow too.
Third-order effects
- If the funding cadence holds, veterinary care splits into platform layers — telehealth front doors, clinic software like Otto, and pharmacy fulfillment — with consolidation pressure toward vertically integrated pet-health companies.
- The recurring theme across these rounds is vet labor scarcity: whichever model demonstrably improves vet retention and utilization sets the template the rest of the industry adopts.
The trend: Pet care is moving from clinic-bound appointments to always-on, digitally delivered services, with successive Series Bs testing whether marketplace or employed-vet models win the veterinarian labor pool.