Insight

Veterinary services market, meet Dr Milou

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In analyzing the growing sectors for businesses, we found that The PetCare market is one of the few to show such a promising trajectory.

After meeting Alban de Préville who told us Dalma's adventure in the world of pet insurance, it's time to introduce you to Christophe Le Dref, the self-proclaimed entrepreneur Chef De Meute of Dr Milou, a solution that wants to make veterinary care accessible to as many people as possible.

Indeed, the latter is evolving in a market for veterinary services that raised 507 million dollars over the last ten years, also responding to a shortage of veterinary professionals and the higher requirements of animal parents.

From Véto to CEO

Christophe Le Dref, 50, is a veterinarian by training. He had dreamed of this job since the age of 5, like many children who love animals and who want to imagine a job in contact with them.

Around the age of 25, he therefore began to practice in a very traditional way in a clinical practice. However, he quickly became disenchanted: the job as he discovered it did not please him. He therefore abandoned this dream to try to seize a second one: to become an actor. He therefore joined the Florent courses and joined a theater company for 5 years. At the same time, he works night shift in a veterinary emergency service at home. Purely motivated by food, these long nights will allow him to fall in love with his first dream again. He finally feels like he's in his place.

It was then that he understood the opportunity to create a home veterinarian service for everyday life.

75% of the animals we see are cats, explains Christophe Le Dref. It is often complicated to take a cat to the vet. So you have a lot of cat parents who give up at the first consultation. Dr. Milou makes it possible to remedicalize these animals, which can be treated much more easily in their environment.”

However, the advantage of Dr. Milou does not end there with many elderly people who cannot travel to care for their animals.

This veterinarian with an entrepreneurial spirit had therefore observed the entire world in the process of digitization and understood how his profession could also be transformed.

Three businesses in a row

Christophe Le Dref then began to thread startups like pearls. After Vetalia in 2008 (which specializes in home veterinary emergencies) and Vetophonie in 2010 (which offers a remote veterinary secretariat service), Dr. Milou was born in 2018.

The entrepreneur has therefore had a privileged position to observe the evolution of the sector over the last few decades.

It is a sector that I have always known and is growing rapidly., he gladly shares. But there is a generational evolution with veterinarians who used to work 70 hours a week and who now want a pro-personal balance by doing the 35 hours. Where one vet was needed, two are needed now. This is an evolution that we still feel today while it started in 2010, it is a long time to train veterinarians. At the same time, there has also been an evolution in the relationship with animals, with people who are ready to spend more on the health of their dogs and cats.”

At the same time, the Pet Care market is slowly structuring until it reaches the stage it is at today. Even if, according to Christophe Le Dref, there is still a long way to go:

I fully believe in telemedicine, and I want it to develop, but that is not yet the case. Our turnover is not based on teleconsultations but on home visits. I am not presenting Dr. Milou as a tech product, for me we are a tech-enabled service company.”

Dr. Milou therefore wants to put technology at the service of veterinarians and their customers. In short: digitizing a sector that really needs it.

A sector that is not experiencing the crisis

I have experienced two crises since I started my entrepreneurial adventures. That of subprime mortgages and the COVID period. This is a sector that has remained really dynamic, with good growth every year and a resilience that funders really like.”

Christophe Le Dref knows something about it: after an initial round (equity and debt) of 2 million euros in 2022, he is currently in the middle of his roadshow to help him finance the growth that Dr Milou is experiencing.

He was thus able to discover that investors were also sensitive to the mission of his company, since it checks the need for positive impact that is found across the board in our society.

In addition to the benefit on animal welfare and the service to people who may have difficulty going to the veterinarian, Dr Milou also donates €1 for each veterinary consultation carried out at home for the association Handi'Chiens who trains and entrusts service dogs free of charge to people with disabilities and/or vulnerability.

The entrepreneur is also very pleased to see the surge of AI in his sector arrive with great pleasure, where it will bring about an upheaval equivalent to that promised to the medical sector:

It is a fairly incredible tool both in terms of organizational efficiency, but also in terms of aid in the diagnosis or interpretation of imagery, radio or scanner where humans are much more fallible than algorithms. I am very excited to say to myself that I am lucky at fifty years old to experience such changes in my profession.

As we can see, Christophe Le Dref would not change sectors for anything in the world. However, he would have one regret:

We need more vets with this slightly entrepreneurial vision.

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