Special Update from Otto Co-founders, Price Fallin & Steven Carter
Today is an incredibly exciting day for our team! We are announcing a new round of investment in our business by some of the best names in the pet industry, as well as an exciting evolution of our brand. We’re proud of our team and thankful for our customers as we look back on the business that we have built and the work we’ve all done together to get to this point.
Our Founding Story
When we launched Otto in 2015, we (Price and Steven) were simply looking for ways to make it easier for pet owners to get connected to their veterinarian while ensuring veterinary teams were compensated for their time.
We were the first to market with a telemedicine platform for clinics and during the early days of growing our small startup, we quickly built amazing relationships with veterinary team members all over the nation. Through these close relationships, we were exposed to additional challenges that veterinary professionals go through on a daily basis. We saw them trying to juggle a million things each day, while also trying to serve a growing number of pets and pet parents with fewer staff members. We saw practice managers and their teams constantly putting patients before themselves, which often resulted in missed lunches and workdays that extended beyond the office “closing” time.
As we got to know more vet teams, we felt the need to change our mission to focus on improving the lives and well-being of veterinary professionals. We knew that in order to do this, we needed to go well beyond telemedicine and broaden the functionality of our products.
In 2020, we launched a new product we called Flow, to help clinics better communicate with clients and automate many of the tedious, monotonous tasks required of teams on a daily basis. The ones no one likes to do but still need to get done.
Over the past few years, we have accelerated product development to include many other ways to help clinics better manage their practice. Some of these include our loyalty program, service reminders, payments, memberships, and much more.
Brand Evolution
Looking back at how far we have come since the early days of telemedicine, we knew that our brand needed to better reflect the evolution of our company. Today, we are excited to announce the launch of our new name – Otto! We came up with Otto as a friendly play on words to highlight our core solution of automating tasks while also grounding our roots in the veterinary industry and our love for pets. We believe this new branding will reflect all of what we have to offer and no longer limit the perception of our company to any one thing.
Under the Otto brand, you can expect to find all of our existing solutions that meet the true needs of veterinary teams, along with new innovative products that will help clinics establish and maintain their competitive advantage against the ever changing industry landscape. For our existing customers, the only immediate change you will see is our new branding when you login.
Accelerating Our Mission
Additionally, we are excited to announce a new round of investment from some of the best names in pet care to help our team carry out our mission. Along with Boehringer Ingelheim, Hills Pet Nutrition is backing Otto with a significant investment. We’re grateful to work with strategic partners who share our mission and vision of helping veterinary clinics and focusing on improving the lives and wellbeing of veterinary teams.
We’re humbled that many other reputable veterinary companies believe in what we are building, and that they want to work with us to help make our shared vision a reality. We will be working closely with Hills and BI to provide new offerings while remaining an independent company that will better serve the veterinary community and we’ll be sharing more details on those programs over the next several months.
A Special Thanks
We would be remiss if we didn’t take this opportunity to thank our customers for their continued support of Otto over the years. Their feedback has been invaluable to us, helped shape the company, and guided us on the right path towards our mission.
When we very first started Otto, we never thought it would lead us to where we are today or have the impact it has had on the industry. The journey has been a rollercoaster of countless ups and downs, but we will always remain committed to providing veterinary teams with the best possible tools and resources to help clinics succeed in building modern practices.
So, that’s the story behind the rebranding of Otto to Otto. We’re so excited about this next chapter in our journey, and while our name has changed, the people reading this post will always remain at the center of the universe for our team.
