Lupa Pets: Why I Visited Before the Series A

In September 2025, I walked into a WeWork expecting a product demo. What I got instead was clarity.

The team took me for a burger and a beer. Within minutes it was clear something had shifted since we'd last spoken — the energy, the hiring pace, the confidence. It felt like a company that had just cleared a major milestone. Weeks later, the Series A announcement confirmed it. $20M. Revenue had grown 50x since January.

Six months earlier, I'd written a detailed investment memo on Lupa for an application to a very well-respected European seed fund. One process, one case study, no feedback. Firstminute led the seed instead.

Disappointing? Yes. But it left me with a question I couldn't shake: why did a 25-year-old ex-banker with no VC experience have such strong conviction in a vet-tech company nobody was talking about? I didn't have anyone to ask. So I used it as fuel — tracked the company, followed the hires, watched the product evolve.

At that point, I had a choice. Accept the silence and move on, or test whether my conviction held up outside a document. So I did something that felt slightly unorthodox: I emailed the founders cold and attached my PDF. A Zoom call turned into an invitation to visit.

I said yes.

The Original Thesis

My initial view was built on market structure. Veterinary software is a £1.4 billion market running on 1990s infrastructure. Only 11% of UK vets report satisfaction with their current practice management systems. The workforce is stretched thin – EU registrations dropped 68% after Brexit. Clinicians spend 10-20 hours weekly on admin that could be automated. Small inefficiencies compound into burnout.

Into this walks a team of ex-BCG consultants and a former Meta engineer, building an AI-native operating system from scratch. Not bolting AI onto legacy software. Rebuilding the entire stack.

On paper, it made sense. The market, the product, the timing. What I couldn't fully assess from a memo was whether the team could execute fast enough, whether users truly trusted the product in live clinical settings, and whether the founders were hiring the right people to scale.

Conviction that can't survive contact with reality isn't conviction. It's preference.

If I'm serious about my thesis, I can't rely solely on desk research. I needed to see how the product behaved in the hands of real users, how the team spoke when they weren't pitching, and whether the culture matched the ambition.

So I showed up.

The Visit

The WeWork itself was unremarkable. Generic desks, glass meeting rooms, the hum of other startups nearby. Inside one room, around 15-20 people in matching purple hoodies were building what they believe could become a category-defining company in European pet care.

The energy was focused, slightly chaotic, unmistakably early-stage. The team walked me through the product, the roadmap, and recent learnings. We talked about who they'd been hiring and from where – engineers leaving Google and Palantir for a sub-20-person vet-tech startup. How they were approaching deployment across different clinic types. The team build-out, the hiring strategy, and what it takes to convince someone to leave an incumbent for a company most people haven't heard of yet.

One moment stuck with me. In a glass-walled office nearby sat an older man in a full suit, deep in conversation with the founders. He looked out of place – more corporate than startup. I never learned who he was. An advisor, perhaps. A strategic partner. A potential enterprise customer.

But the contrast captured something important. Behind the clean narratives of funding announcements, early-stage companies are still fragile systems held together by trust, speed, and judgment. That's where real risk and real upside live.

What I Missed Initially

My original memo focused heavily on market structure and product architecture. What I underweighted was how quickly trust compounds once a product crosses a usability threshold in regulated workflows.

The numbers told the story. Clinics using Lupa report 60 minutes saved daily through Jerry, the AI co-pilot handling clinical notes and client communications. 33% fewer missed appointments. 75% fewer missed calls. The platform is 20x faster to learn than legacy systems – critical in an industry where software changes historically take weeks of painful retraining.

Then there's distribution. The Vetsure partnership gives Lupa exclusive access to 1,200+ UK clinics. Within the first month, 12 entered final contract negotiations. That's not a press release partnership. That's real conversion at scale.

Veterinary software isn't adopted because it's clever. It's adopted because clinicians stop thinking about it mid-consult. That moment – when software disappears into the workflow – is hard to model and easy to miss from the outside.

Hearing how clinics actually use Lupa made that clear in a way no spreadsheet could.

The Team Signal

I'd tracked the hiring. Engineers from Google, Palantir, DeepMind joining a sub-20-person startup. Vivek Dhiman from Google as Engineering Director. Harry Jones from Palantir as Engineering Lead. Michael Dowling from McKinsey and Elephant Healthcare as VP of Sales and Operations.

When that calibre of talent leaves those seats for an early-stage vet-tech company, it tells you something about the opportunity they're seeing internally. These are all individuals with high opportunity-cost of switching firms; I started to learn why.

The team has scaled from roughly four at seed to 35-45 today. Regional general managers are now in place for DACH, Southern Europe, and APAC. The Veterinary AI Lab – launched alongside the Series A – employs researchers from DeepMind and Meta, publishing peer-reviewed work and establishing industry AI standards.

That's not a startup running on fumes. That's a company building institutional depth while still moving fast.

The Competition Question

The obvious question is competition. Digitail raised $37m and has a stronger US footprint. But veterinary software isn't winner-take-all in the near term. The UK alone has 5,300+ clinics, most running on software they hate. Europe is even more fragmented. The replacement cycle is just beginning, not ending.

Lupa isn't trying to out-raise Digitail in the US. They're trying to own Europe before anyone else wakes up — and between the Vetsure distribution deal, AI-native architecture built for European regulatory requirements, and a team that's shipping faster than any incumbent, they're doing exactly that.

ezyVet, owned by IDEXX since 2021, has corporate resources but also corporate constraints. Innovation slows inside a $50 billion diagnostics company. Vetspire serves its parent Thrive's network. Neither is positioned to move fast in an AI-native direction.

The market is big enough for multiple winners. The question is whether Lupa can establish a defensible European position before competitive intensity increases.

I think they can. In fact, I think they will.

The Lesson

This visit didn't change my view on the market. It changed my confidence in the execution.

It reinforced a belief I now hold strongly: some of the most important information in venture isn't available remotely. You only get it by showing up – and by being willing to be wrong in person. That's a habit I intend to keep.

The founders – no older than myself – want to build the Spotify for petcare. After sitting in that room, watching that team operate, I believe they will.