For startups bridging AI and animal health, early commercial validation can be the difference between momentum and stalling. Bernardo Petriz, CEO & Co-Founder of Peptidus Biotech, shares how Peptidus secured its first seed round, engaged directly with livestock producers in Brazil, and built industry credibility through programmes like vHive, to move from discovery platform to commercial pipeline.

Derick Whitley, CEO of TRAVV, shares how strategic AI adoption across operations is allowing them to achieve more with their raised capital than previous generations of startups. From automated coding and brand development to administrative workflows, he reveals which AI applications are delivering the highest ROI for resource-constrained companies and how this operational approach is creating competitive advantage in scaling diagnostics services.

Cat Health Corp. pursued a non-traditional multi-API drug strategy, overcoming investor resistance and building a faster path to clinic by leveraging existing compounds and novel combinations. This session will explore why unconventional drug models face pushback, how existing molecules can accelerate development timelines, and what founders need to do to bring investors along on non-traditional strategies.

HPAI costs hundreds of millions per outbreak. PRRS circulates persistently through the most biosecure swine systems in the world. The science to prevent both exists. Yet delivering solutions at a commercial scale is limited by challenges in demonstrating ROI and operational capacity.  

• How the economics of prevention need to be reframed around visible, near-term financial return rather than disease avoidance alone
• How data, diagnostics, and early detection are shifting biosecurity from reactive to preventive, and what tools are genuinely changing producer behavior
• The role of vaccination and emerging biological tools in building more resilient production systems at commercial scale
• What designing prevention systems for real operational conditions, consolidating herds, untrained workforces, and hostile environments, actually requires
• What collaboration across producers, industry, and regulators needs to look like to make progress at scale

Therapeutic nutrition is one of the largest underleveraged opportunities in companion animal care. The evidence base is growing, new data infrastructure is making outcomes measurable for the first time, and pet owner appetite for nutrition-led health solutions is clear. This panel explores what it takes to make nutrition a more integrated, measurable, and commercially sustainable part of clinical practice.

• The evidence base for therapeutic nutrition: where it's strong and where the gaps are
• Using outcomes data to make the clinical case for nutrition recommendations
• Pet owner demand and how practices are, and aren't, meeting it
• Communicating value and price in a category where D2C competition is growing
• What a genuinely integrated nutrition strategy looks like inside a practice