When Joe Spector’s corgi, Eddie, ate four M&Ms, the Hims cofounder spent hours trying to find an emergency vet who could see him. One office pointed him to a pet poison hotline, and another was an hour away and had a four-hour wait. The bill came out to $2,000.
Spector thought at the time “this does not have to be that way,” he told Fortune.
That stressful scramble in 2021 sparked the idea for Dutch, the veterinary telehealth company Spector launched on July 1 of that year after helping build and take public Hims & Hers, the direct-to-consumer telehealth brand best known for treating hair loss and sexual wellness. Those companies have since grown exponentially to cover an array of health concerns.
Dutch, which just marked its fifth anniversary, offers members video visits with veterinarians for a flat $100 a year covering up to five pets. That amounts to roughly the cost of a single in-person visit at a regular veterinary office. The company now operates in 35 states, up from eight at launch, as more states loosen restrictions on veterinary telemedicine. The company has logged millions of interactions and now counts more than 100,000 active members, according to the company. Dutch raised $20 million in early 2022 to scale the platform, in a round led by Forerunner Ventures.
