A Veterinarian and a Tech Guru Walk into a (Coffee) Bar…

In 2015, an unexpected meeting between two Terps – who graduated 18 years apart – led to the creation of Instinct, a software designed specifically for veterinary hospitals.

Here’s how it happened.

After graduating from veterinary school in 2008, Dr. Caleb Frankel ’04 hoped to someday open a chain of specialty animal hospitals.

But while completing his emergency veterinary training at a Florida animal hospital, he said he was “blindsided” by the state of the field’s technology.

“What the veterinary setting had for software was 20 years behind other industries,” he said. “I recognized that my colleagues, for example, were spending hours after their shifts writing records and dealing with 11 clicks to do a simple task. There are a lot of problems in the veterinary industry, and I started seeing the correlation between the really frustrating technology, or lack thereof, and the problems.”

While the Pennsylvanian still dreamed of opening his own hospitals, he said he couldn’t stop thinking about those problems – or ways to solve them.

So in 2015, Frankel began designing software that could streamline and modernize veterinary hospital operations. Recognizing he needed additional support, he vowed to “take a meeting” with anybody who asked for one that year.

That included a liaison from the University of Maryland Alumni Association. Frankel shared his software idea with the liaison, who mentioned she had just met with Rick Genzer ‘86, a fellow Pennsylvanian and “software technology guru,” Frankel recalled.

The liaison made the connection, and a few weeks later, Frankel and Genzer, currently director of investments for Ben Franklin Technology Partners, met for coffee.

Read the full article here.

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