He spent fifteen years building software for businesses everyone else ignored. Then he picked the hardest one of all: the refrigerator full of vaccines in a pediatrician's back room.
The economist who decided a fridge full of vaccines was the most valuable thing he could optimize.
A child gets a vaccine. Simple. Except behind that two-second jab sits insurance verification, inventory counts, expiration tracking, state registry uploads, reimbursement claims, and the very real possibility that the practice loses money on the dose. Pedro Sanchez de Lozada built a company around that hidden ledger.
Canid does the nitty-gritty of running a vaccine program so a pediatrician can do the part they trained for - looking after the kid on the table.
The company manages vaccine programs for more than 150 independent pediatricians across 12 states, with over 300,000 children in those patient panels and north of 121,000 patients vaccinated through the platform. The scanning system kills manual data entry and pushes vaccine records straight into state registries. The financial side chases reimbursement so the fridge actually pays for itself. Software and service, bundled, because Lozada is adamant that neither one fixes the problem alone.
He did not arrive at pediatrics by accident, and he did not arrive by clipboard either. His mother and his uncle are both pediatricians. Healthcare was dinner-table talk long before it was a cap table. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, he stepped in to help manage their practices, and got a close-up view of the administrative machinery that grinds away beneath community medicine. The spreadsheet, it turns out, was the villain.
"Pediatricians spend years training to provide exceptional care for children, not to become experts in revenue cycle management or inventory systems."
- Pedro Sanchez de LozadaBefore Canid there was a long apprenticeship in the unglamorous art of helping small businesses run better. He grew up in Chile, finished high school at the International School Nido de Aguilas in Santiago, and came to the United States in 2008 for the University of Chicago, where he read economics and, on the side, curated TEDxUChicago. An early internship working shoulder-to-shoulder with a CEO left a mark he describes bluntly: it got him addicted to building companies.
The addiction had a through-line. Udemy, where he did business development and marketing while the online-course market was still being invented. A short-lived swing of his own called LogiMD. A stint as a growth engineer at Koding. Then Rinse, the on-demand dry-cleaning startup, where he launched the Washington DC market and ran corporate growth and special ops out of San Francisco - the kind of role where you learn what actually breaks when a service business tries to scale. Then Merlin, where he ran marketing for three years. Different industries, same obsession: give the little guy the tools the big guys take for granted.
In 2020 he pulled it together and started Canid, joining On Deck as a fellow the same year. The bet was that the most under-served small business in America might be the independent pediatric practice, and the most thankless job inside it might be vaccines - high-cost inventory, thin margins, and a regulatory paper trail that never sleeps. Five years later the bet looks sound.
"We built Canid because we saw firsthand what vaccine management does to a practice. Software and service together, because you can't solve this problem with just one."
- Pedro Sanchez de LozadaIn June 2025 Canid announced a $10 million Series A led by Telescope Partners, with FJ Labs, Brooklyn Bridge Ventures, SeedtoB and others along for the ride, taking the company's total funding to $12.9 million. The founder ended up in Forbes. None of which changes the day job, which is still, fundamentally, making sure the vaccine in the fridge does not quietly bankrupt the practice that bought it.
What makes him unusual is not the resume, impressive as it is. It is the consistency of the target. Plenty of founders chase the biggest market. Lozada keeps choosing the most neglected one - dry cleaners, course creators, and now the pediatrician down the street - and then refuses to hand over half a solution. For a sector that has watched a thousand health-tech demos promise the moon and ship a dashboard, that insistence on doing the boring operational work too is, in its own quiet way, the whole pitch.
He is still based in New York, still building, still talking about the same thing he was talking about a decade ago: technology that lets small businesses thrive. The vaccines just happen to be the version of the problem worth a life's work.
His mother and uncle are pediatricians. He learned the trade's frustrations before he ever wrote a line of a pitch deck - then ran their practices during Covid.
Canid pairs the platform with actual service. Lozada won't ship a dashboard and call it a solution, because the operational grind is the problem.
Dry cleaners, course creators, now neighborhood pediatricians. The customer changes; the instinct to arm the underdog never does.
An early internship working directly with a CEO is what got him, in his own telling, "addicted to building companies." Everything since has been that habit, refined.
He finished high school at the International School Nido de Aguilas in Chile, then crossed a hemisphere for the University of Chicago in 2008.
Before healthtech, he opened Rinse's Washington DC market. If you want to learn what breaks when a service scales, on-demand laundry is a fine teacher.
A vaccine is high-cost inventory on thin margins. Get the reimbursement wrong and the practice loses money for protecting a child. Canid exists to stop that math.