You ever watch someone take an old, broken process and not just fix it, but wrap it in elegance, automate the soul-sucking parts, and deliver it like a five-star meal in a brown paper bag? That’s what Koala Health just pulled off.
$20M in fresh Series B capital just hit their war chest. Valspring Capital’s leading this round like they saw the play three moves before it unfolded. Menlo Ventures, First Round Capital, BoxGroup, Operator Partners, they’re not just names on a cap table, they’re the kind of investors who don’t show up unless the product hums, the market aches, and the founder gets it. And Gavin Cotter? He more than gets it.
Gavin built operational muscle inside the chaos engine that was PillPack before Amazon dropped a cool billion to bring it in-house. From Kiva Systems to Tyco to BMW Group, the man’s been blueprinting precision before “logistics” became a VC buzzword. Now, with co-founders Jordan Smith and Hew Hamilton in the foxhole, he’s turned that same pill-slinging magic toward your four-legged best friend.
Koala doesn’t just mail meds for pets. They engineered a pet prescription ecosystem. Imagine a world where your vet taps one button, and a perfectly timed, date-labeled “Koala pouch” lands at your doorstep, every dose, no stress. No upcharges. No surprise shipping. No guilt trip from your clinic’s front desk for not buying in-house. And they’re doing this at scale, 25,000 clinics plugged in, 80M pet parents in reach, and climbing.
Here’s what gets real: clinics hate being the Walgreens for Rover. Inventory headaches. Expired meds. Staff time wasted pushing pills instead of practicing care. Koala flipped that burden into a business model. By integrating with ezyVet and building out Koala Vet, they automated the back office while improving patient outcomes. Vets save time. Pet parents get peace of mind. Pets get better.
The real flex? It’s not the pouches, the tech stack (PostgreSQL, Python, Blueshift), or the marketing. It’s the operational elegance. You don’t scale to all 50 states with just swagger. You scale because your backend runs like a Rolex and your frontend feels like Spotify. Koala nailed both.
This isn’t a story about another “Pet Tech” startup. It’s about a team that took the chaos of modern veterinary care and quietly rewired the whole circuit. One pouch at a time. One clinic at a time. One step closer to pet healthcare that actually works.
Gavin Cotter, Jordan Smith, Hew Hamilton, congrats. Yumin Choi and the Valspring team, nice pull. There’s a whole lot of barking going on in this space. Koala’s the one bringing clarity, not just noise.
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