Incredibly, Instinct turned 5 years old earlier this year! 🎉

That means it’s been more than 5 years since we met in a humble basement in the Philadelphia suburbs to map out a bold vision of truly helping veterinary centers through better technology tools.

That little idea has grown into something bright and important. Every day, we’re honored to see thousands of veterinary professionals around the globe rely on Instinct to power their care, many at the industry’s most advanced and prestigious care centers, including hospitals training future generations of veterinary professionals.

As we reflect on our first 5 years, we’re extremely proud of several achievements:

• The growth of our full practice management system, Instinct EMR
• Being one of Fortune Magazine’s 100 Best Small Companies (#32!)
• And seeing our software power over 300 million safe treatments for beloved animal family members across 4 continents.

Given that it is the season of thanks, it’s worth mentioning that we couldn’t have done any of this without the forward-thinking hospitals and veterinary professionals who believe there is a fundamentally better way to run veterinary centers of the future.

With tremendous gratitude toward them (you), we’re using this time to double down on Instinct’s mission:

🧡 Caring for the caretakers of the world’s leading veterinary hospitals by building the best technology the profession has ever seen.  

And while this year has marked a pretty awesome milestone, Instinct is just getting started.

Since our very first days, we’ve aspired to create a company that positively impacts the veterinary industry we care so deeply about. To that end, we’re positioning ourselves to serve the profession for decades to come, intending to get better and better with time.

Here’s an update on how we’re doing that and what’s to come.  

🥳 An Investment in the Future We All Deserve

First, we’re proud to report that we started our next 5-year journey with a significant investment from Mainsail Partners, a respected growth equity firm with decades of experience helping software companies like Instinct.

Our profession is facing an unprecedented time of exciting yet challenging growth, and Instinct is dedicated to being a part of the solution by building thoughtfully designed software that veterinary teams actually love.

So when we set out to choose an investment partner, we were careful to find the right team that understood the long-term vision we aimed to build. That’s why we selected Mainsail, a founder-friendly company that truly understands and supports what we’re trying to do.

We see this as an important milestone for our centers.

It’s more than an investment in Instinct—it’s a vote of confidence in the broader veterinary profession, animal care, and the future we all deserve.

🧑‍⚕️ Instinct Is Veterinarian-Led and In It For the Long Haul

Instinct has always been independent and veterinarian-led, and that isn’t changing.

Our team (including our shareholders) consists of dozens of smart, creative, and experienced veterinarians, specialists, veterinary nurses, front desk employees, and practice managers, and that isn’t changing either.

In fact, many of us at Instinct work in practice (me included). Having a team that takes shifts in hospitals and uses our software is one of the many reasons we think Instinct is so special.

This new investment is exciting because it provides our already-great team with incredible new resources to deploy toward accelerating innovation and product development, expanding our team, bolstering our infrastructure, and maturing our operations and support so we can serve our hospitals even better.

It also allows us to continue our industry-leading commitment to your data privacy. More and more, other software companies are building business models that rely on using your hospital data. We’ve taken a different approach, adopting the AVMA’s data principles and baking them into everything we do without sacrificing innovation, ignoring data science, or selling your data.

The bottom line? We know that choosing software is a pivotal decision for veterinary centers. Hospitals that choose Instinct can count on us to be around and innovating for the long haul.

🚀 Instinct EMR Is Our Future

Years ago, I wrote an article for Clinician’s Brief about the state of veterinary software.

I outlined the vision that truly innovative practice management software could one day help veterinary professionals communicate with each other, catch errors, connect to new treatments, illuminate previously hidden clinical patterns, get through daily paperwork faster, and ultimately unleash an army of in-practice researchers who could truly push medicine further.

Some 7 years after that article, we’re proud to be part of that solution.

We launched Instinct EMR last year with a plan to fulfill these promises and many more. Greatly expanding Instinct has now become our primary focus. At the same time, we are committed to quality. If we are going to build the platform of the future and solve the veterinary software problem for good, we know that focusing on a high-quality foundation as well as speed and innovation is important.

It’s a big project, but we’re excited because as we enter 2023, we believe that we’re well on our way to building the best platform for the veterinary centers of the future and that anyone who chooses us will be happy they did.

🔮 What’s Next for Instinct and Our Hospitals

Recently, I started sharing more of what I’m seeing and learning out there, and I hope to continue doing so as long as it’s helpful. But it had been a long time since I personally wrote about our industry.

There’s a good reason—we’ve been busy this year! Busy designing, busy writing code, busy testing, busy listening, busy learning, and generally busy helping our hospitals. We’ve also been busy building out our team and software for the future.

In just 18 months, we not only built and launched Instinct EMR but also the industry’s first pharmacy-agnostic e-prescribing platform, Instinct Scripts (available in beta).

We did that while continuing to expand our Instinct Treatment Plan with innovative tools such as our new digital anesthesia sheets.

In the coming months, we’re turning our focus on maturing various parts of our applications and releasing functionality that we know our hospitals are excited to benefit from.

Some of that work includes:

• More robust referring veterinarian tracking and communication
• More reminders and client communication tools
• Advanced financial and accounting functionality
• Tools for high-quality veterinary inventory management
• A new reporting dashboard with customizable analytics
• A more open API for integrations to improve workflow efficiency
• Integrating e-prescribing for use with outside pharmacies
• Additional medical and decision support tools
• Advanced search, research, and teaching tools

Finally, we’re also working on our general practice functionality and pet owner communication and marketing tools, as we know more and more small hospitals are coming to us interested in adopting Instinct.

The first 5 years have been amazing, but we believe that the next 5 will be even more exciting for Instinct hospitals.

We have a lot to do and know that taking on this kind of ambitious work is not always easy. Nothing meaningful ever is, but we’re committed to doing it, and that’s why we’re well on our way to building something that matters to advanced veterinary centers and animal-loving families of the future.

It’s the kind of opportunity that is as incredible as it is rare, and it’s what motivates us to get up every day and build Instinct.

Thanks again for all the support! 🧡