Show Notes
Everybody says the problem with veterinary medicine is burnout. Yannick Bloem thinks the problem is paperwork.
A veterinarian finishes a full day of consults. The animals have been seen. The owners have gone home. And then the second shift starts: SOAP notes, discharge summaries, referral letters, records that have to exist by law whether or not anyone has the energy left to write them. Two hours, most nights. That is the part of the job nobody signed up for, and it is the part that quietly pushes people out of a profession they love.
Yannick Bloem spent five years as a senior software engineer at Apple building productivity software for hundreds of millions of people. Before that he built a consumer startup in Switzerland that reached over 100,000 users. When GPT landed in late 2022 and he was living in San Francisco watching doors open in real time, the obvious move for a person with that resume was to chase the frontier. He did the opposite. He called a friend from Toronto whose mother is a veterinarian, and they went hunting in the least fashionable corner of healthcare they could find.
That friend is Mike Parent, now CoVet's COO. Mike had grown up filling out paperwork alongside his mom during school holidays and had already built a company in the space. When Yannick brought him a list of AI ideas seeded by his sister's stories from human hospitals, Mike pointed at vet med and said it was the better industry to build for. They got a rough, ugly, half working product into the hands of about 20 beta vets through Mike's network. The vets loved it anyway. That gap between how bad the product was and how excited the users were is the entire founding signal.
Two and a half years later CoVet is used daily across North America, Europe, and Australia, in 20 languages, by groups including Mars Veterinary Health, IVC Evidensia, CVS Group, VetPartners, Petfolk, and Small Door Veterinary. The company grew user volume 550% in 2025 alone. It employs over 30 DVMs and RVTs in house, and Yannick says the team is approaching 130 people. It has raised remarkably little to get there.
The episode goes deep on three things founders keep getting wrong. First, that the newest frontier model is automatically the right model. Yannick's medical team evaluates models constantly and routes tasks based on speed, cost, and quality, and the newest release frequently loses. Second, that regulatory burden is a tax. CoVet built to human healthcare standards in an industry where HIPAA does not strictly apply, and that decision became the reason enterprise groups across Europe and Australasia could say yes. Third, that you need a mega round. CoVet grew on customer cash flow, took angel money from veterinarians who had sold clinics, and raised later from a position where nobody was desperate.
There is also a section on the domain, which Yannick correctly describes as drip. And a section on why horses need so much more paperwork than cats.
CoVet: https://co.vetNot One More Vet: https://nomv.orgYannick Bloem on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yannick-bloem/CoVet for students: https://co.vet/students
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