In the past three years, two of the most well-funded veterinary technology startups in the world have quietly shut down.

Fuzzy, a US telehealth platform for pets, raised US$80.5 million before closing in 2024. ZumVet, Singapore’s best-known vet-tech startup, raised US$3.7 million before winding down the same year. Neither failed because the founders were wrong about the problem. Pet healthcare is genuinely broken — fragmented records, inconsistent quality, and no data continuity when an animal changes clinics.

They failed because they tried to solve it with software first.

I’ve spent the last two years building veterinary infrastructure across Thailand, Myanmar, and Laos, and I’ve come to believe that the sequence matters more than the product. In regulated, trust-based industries, software is the last layer you build, not the first. If you invert that order, your burn rate scales faster than your adoption, and no amount of funding will close the gap.

The software-first trap

The standard vet-tech playbook looks rational on paper. Build a clean, modern product. Sell it directly to clinics or consumers. Use growth capital to subsidise acquisition until network effects kick in.

The problem is that veterinary medicine is not a software adoption problem. It is a trust and workflow problem. Clinics don’t switch their practice management system because the new one has a better interface. They switch — or don’t switch — based on whether their technicians can run a full day of appointments without the system failing, whether patient histories survive migration, and whether the vendor will still exist in five years.

None of those is solved by a better onboarding flow. They are solved by being embedded in the infrastructure that clinics already depend on — regulatory registries, diagnostic equipment, referral networks, and supplier relationships. Companies that start with software have to manufacture this trust through sales and marketing spend. Companies that start with infrastructure inherit it.

What we did differently

When we started building in Southeast Asia, we deliberately reversed the order. We built the network before we built the SaaS.

The first product was a microchip registry — arguably the least exciting product in vet-tech. It is also one of the most load-bearing. A microchip registry is the one database a clinic cannot operate without once microchipping becomes mandatory. It touches government, breeders, importers, insurance, and every clinic that scans an animal.

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We spent three years on registry, partner onboarding, and regulatory relationships before launching a full practice management system. Today, the network covers more than 880 partner hospitals and over 110,000 registered animals across three countries, with roughly 30 per cent market share in Thailand. The SaaS layer, which we recently launched, sits on top of that — not in front of it.

The point is not that microchips are the answer. The point is that in any regulated vertical, there is usually one boring piece of infrastructure that every participant has to touch. If you build that piece first, every subsequent product you launch inherits distribution. If you skip it, every product launch is a cold start.

Three things I’d tell another founder

• First, identify the load-bearing layer in your industry before you decide what to build. In vet-tech, it is registries and diagnostic workflow. In fintech, it is KYC and settlement. In logistics, it is customs and warehousing. These are rarely the most fundable ideas, because they look operational rather than technological. That is exactly why they are defensible once you own them.
• Second, accept that the first three years will look slow by venture standards. We operated for most of our early history without institutional funding. That was partly constraint and partly choice — raising a large round early would have pushed us toward the software-first playbook, because capital needs to be deployed into things investors can measure quarterly. Infrastructure does not produce quarterly metrics. It produces compounding ones.
• Third, be sceptical of comparables. When a founder in your category raises US$50 million and gets written up as the category leader, the instinct is to copy the model. But the company that raises first is not always the company that wins. In veterinary software specifically, the correlation between funding raised and long-term survival has been negative. The companies still operating in Southeast Asia are almost entirely bootstrapped or lightly funded. That is not a coincidence.

Also Read: How telemedicine can revolutionise the veterinary world?

Timing matters, but only if the infrastructure is ready

Regulatory tailwinds are arriving across the region. Thailand made pet microchipping mandatory in January 2026. Malaysia announced a mandatory pilot the following month. More markets will follow.

Regulation is a powerful forcing function, but it rewards whoever is already operating the infrastructure. It does not reward whoever has the best-marketed software. A founder who starts building a registry the day the mandate is announced is already three years behind.

The broader lesson, I think, is that the most common failure mode in regulated verticals is not building the wrong product. It is building the right product in the wrong order. Software is easier to build than trust, which is why founders default to it. But in industries where the end user has to believe the system will still work in a decade, trust has to come first, and software has to serve it.

The vet-tech graveyard is not a story about bad products. It is a story about inverted sequences.

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