Munich Startup: What does Petleo do? What problem do you solve?
Julian Weritz, Petleo: Petleo is dedicated to digitizing veterinary practices and other service providers for pets, such as animal physiotherapists, dog groomers, nutrition consultants, alternative practitioners, and dog training schools. Our pet health platform connects veterinarians and pet care service providers with pet owners through practical tools such as online appointment booking, electronic pet health records, and fully digital new customer registration to provide relief for providers and transparency for owners across the entire value chain.
We are convinced that modern veterinary care requires more than just a visit to the clinic. We improve efficiency, make it easier for pet owners to book services, and ensure that all furry friends can be treated in a timely and thorough manner instead of having to deal with time-consuming administrative tasks.
Munich Startup: But that already exists, doesn’t it!
Julian Weritz: There are already digital solutions, but what sets Petleo apart from others is our connectivity. Petleo integrates seamlessly into existing systems and promotes digital data exchange between the various actors. Digitalizing these complex processes has many advantages: In the past, pet owners would come home from a veterinary appointment with a pile of printed papers, CDs, or handwritten notes. Today, thanks to the Petleo platform, the entire health record is structured and collected on your phone with just one click – and in seconds. Additionally, automatic reminders for follow-up appointments and vaccination schedules ensure that no appointment is forgotten. And the best part: you can also share the findings with family and friends. So everyone immediately knows how their beloved furry friend is doing.
Furthermore, our mix of expertise in the team is unique. We not only have a veterinarian as co-founder who knows the intricacies and needs of the profession, but also experts with extensive experience in the e-health sector, particularly in human medicine. This combination gives us a tremendous advantage in creating a tailor-made, intuitive, and effective platform.
Making knowledge about your own pet visible and usable
Munich Startup: What is your founding story?
Julian Weritz: We identified gaps in communication between veterinarians and pet owners as well as the digital lag in the German veterinary sector. There was no comprehensive system that could collect and digitally manage all information about your own pet. This led to the vision of an app that addresses the many pitfalls and challenges faced by pet owners and makes knowledge about their pet visible and usable.
The digital application was then expanded with B2B features and brought into the daily routine of clinics and practices. Our seamless interfaces play a major role here: Petleo integrates into existing practice management systems used by veterinarians without interfering with internal processes or ongoing systems or requiring a complete system overhaul.
Munich Startup: What have been your biggest challenges so far?
Julian Weritz: Our biggest challenge was proving ourselves as a young team. We also had to do a lot of persuasion work regarding the digitalization of outdated systems. We bridged the gap between old system worlds on the provider side and our modern app.
To illustrate this lengthy process, we like to describe this challenge with a metaphor: we are essentially the data highway that ensures cars (pet data records) and trucks (service providers) can traffic smoothly and quickly on our expanded route. After initial test drives and repairs to the road surface, about half a year after founding we managed to successfully earn from tolls (B2B subscriptions).
By now we are market leader in the DACH region and Luxembourg for digital pet health and have not only gained important stakeholders on the B2B market but also built a great 20-person team and won them over to our vision.
Petleo is to develop into an all-in-one solution
Munich Startup: Where do you want to stand in one year, where in five years?
Julian Weritz: In one year we want to be the leading online booking platform in the DACH region and have completed initial rollouts in European countries. We are also working intensively on additional features to digitalize processes, such as a digital health record as well as AI-supported analysis and forecasting of animal data. Furthermore, Petleo will increasingly develop into an all-in-one solution and in the future will also enable payment processing and asynchronous communication between providers and pet owners.
In five years we want to have digitalized all relevant processes within the value chain and be the leading platform for pet health across all of Europe.
Munich Startup: How have you experienced the Munich startup location so far?
Julian Weritz: Munich is the new Berlin for us personally. With its vibrant tech scene, we have found both qualified talent and valuable partners here. We regularly participate in BayStartup events, were part of the Insurtech Hub Munich badge, were able to exchange with many other startups, and have big players like Zooplus and Evidensia within walking distance. We also have great investors from the greater Munich area on board, such as Markus Reichenberger, Katja Lindo, Ulrich Müller-Menrad, Georg Hofer, and Patrick Palacin.
Munich Startup: Quick exit or in it for the long haul?
Julian Weritz: Our vision for Petleo is not a quick exit. We are determined to actively shape and revolutionize animal care tomorrow. We are always open to strategic partnerships that can accelerate our mission, as our main focus is on long-term impact. Petleo was planned from the outset as an open platform to enable all parties in the pet ecosystem to realize mutual benefits through the use of structured data. Our main target groups include veterinarians and service providers such as physiotherapists, pet groomers, and of course pet owners themselves. We also serve other cooperation partners such as pet health insurance companies, the animal pharmaceutical industry, and are already working on collaboration with laboratories and research institutions.
