The Small Business Project: Telehealth start-up putting vets on demand
Monday, 1 December 2025
The Small Business Project is a weekly series that shines the spotlight on Kiwi small businesses doing interesting and unusual things in their industries.
Wellington couple Katie and David Barton-Ginger set up telehealth business Helpp Vet to put on-demand medical advice in the hands of pet owners. David tells Aimee Shaw he has global aspirations for the platform.
What has your venture set out to achieve?
Helpp Vet is a web-based app that connects pet owners to vet professionals. We’re building a global platform where vets can come on, register themselves, and then a pet owner can, through a filtering system, find a vet that's essentially perfect for them, based on country, certain animal types, experience, and other filters that they can use.
We want to make it accessible and affordable for pet owners, and from a vet perspective, giving them the ability to make some passive income. About 98% of the vets that we have on our platform are women whose circumstances mean that they can't work in a clinic any more, so this allows them to set their own days and times when they want to work. It’s not about replacing the vet clinic, we can't prescribe at this point in time, and they can't give a diagnosis; it's all about triage advice.
I used to run digital for the All Blacks and for New Zealand Rugby for 16 years, and every now and again, a cool piece of technology or an idea would come through. One business I came across connected All Black players with media organisations - like radio or TV stations - and it made it a really secure and private environment where players didn't have to share their phone numbers with journalists, but use a two-sided video stream that allowed media organisations to use whatever they needed. Having come off a farm and having experiences with vets where I couldn't get hold of them, I thought there must be something that we could create to take that technology and help people from a pet perspective in getting advice.
I started developing our platform about three years ago. We got a first version of it up about a year ago, but we haven't gone out trying to create any awareness; we're only just starting to do that now. It’s been a chicken and egg situation, deciding: Do we get the vets first or the pet owners on board first? Or, do we go and focus on the pet owners and create that awareness? But we decided to focus on the vet - vet nurses, vet techs, vets and vet specialists first. We've got around 30 on the platform as of now.
How much time and money have you invested?
I have my own customer relationship management (CRM) business, and so I’ve been doing this around that. I’ve spent my evenings and weekends for three years on this. In terms of money, the investment has certainly been north of $100,000.
What’s the biggest challenge your business is facing?
The challenge has been the fact that when we started it, it was a new concept, and we've had to be careful on how we plan it out and construct it. We've consulted a lot with the New Zealand Vet Council. You need to be careful in an industry like this from a regulatory perspective, not only in New Zealand but also in different countries. We’re looking for similar groups overseas to help us navigate their rules as we look to pursue other markets.
How does Helpp Vet charge for its services?
Most other telehealth practices charge a monthly subscription, but we're on a “user pays” model where it's based on time blocks. When a pet owner phones up, they are charged for the first 10 minutes and then for every five minute block after that. Our rates start from $25 for 10 minutes with a vet nurse, and then it goes to $35 for a qualified vet. We think the pricing is competitive for professional advice, and little compared to what you pay to go into a physical vet clinic.
What’s next for Helpp Vet?
We’re cutting our teeth in New Zealand, that's what we're focusing on at the moment. But we are slowly looking closer at Australia, and naturally, we want to go to the UK as well. America would come later down the track.
While we're not focusing on growing in any other country right now, we're finding that there's more vets from other countries that are hearing about us and joining the platform.
In three years’ time you will be …
We would certainly want to be well established in New Zealand and Australia, and by then would be looking to get a good foothold in other markets, probably through organic growth more than anything, rather than us going out and targeting those explicitly. By then we would expect to have 200 or 300 vets on on our platform.
The market for pets is huge; it's in the billions of dollars. America is definitely the biggest market. However, some markets in Asia are definitely growing really quickly. But our initial focus is countries that have English as a first language, or where they have a lot of people that speak English. Our platform is built in a way to be able to scale well and become multilingual easily, but we need to be careful on how we approach those countries that don't have English as a first language. We'd likely have to partner with someone in those areas to be able to do that.
What’s one thing you wish you’d known before starting the business?
We haven't gone far enough to develop something that we can't change and pivot if we need to, but I probably would have liked to have got what we have out a bit sooner, even if it was a slightly less complete version.
Most helpful piece of advice you have ever received?
Stay focused. Once the platform is completed, and we're not far away, we could apply it to just about any industry. When talking to friends who are in the VC community, their advice is stay focused on what you're doing and build out a really good product before you even think about anything like that. We're focusing on the vet community and the pet industry, and don't even think about any of the other opportunities at the moment.
If you would like your business to feature in The Small Business Project, email Aimee Shaw at aimee.shaw@stuff.co.nz