Sebastian Gabor couldn't read the vaccination schedule his vet scribbled by hand. Digging into why, he found an entire industry still running on software from the 1990s. Digitail is his answer.
In 2017, Sebastian Gabor became a first-time dog owner and did the ordinary thing: he took his dog to the vet. At the end of the visit, the veterinarian handed him the animal's vaccination schedule written by hand on a sticky note. He could not read it. That small piece of paper, and the frustration attached to it, is the seed of a company now used by more than 10,000 veterinarians around the world.
Gabor is not a veterinarian. He is a software builder from Romania who had already lived through a full career before Digitail. He had run an events NGO, built a development studio to nearly 100 engineers, shipped an app that gained and then lost 200,000 users in the span of two days, and co-founded one of his country's largest civic-tech non-profits. By the time the sticky note showed up, he had collected the kind of scar tissue that makes a founder pause before starting again. He started again anyway.
What kept him going was the size of the gap. When Gabor looked into veterinary software, he found that roughly 80% of animal hospitals were still running on legacy systems built in the 1990s, and many relied entirely on paper. Food arrived by app, cars arrived by app, but the place where people brought a sick animal often ran on sticky notes and filing cabinets.
He and his co-founder Ruxandra Pui framed it plainly: two software developers and pet lovers asking why the tools in a vet clinic had barely changed in thirty years. That question became a product thesis, and in 2018 it became Digitail - an all-in-one, cloud-based platform that pulls scheduling, medical records, invoicing, inventory, client messaging and a pet-parent app into one place.
That line is the whole philosophy in a sentence. Most software companies want you to log in more often. Gabor wants the opposite. The measure of success he keeps returning to is not screen time or feature count - it is a clinic that used to see 15 patients a day now seeing 30 or more, with the staff still walking out the door on time.
Gabor is unusually direct about the losses that got him here. His entrepreneurial start was an event agency and cultural NGO in Romania. A phone call from a business-school friend in 2012 pulled him into app development, and that turned into ITGambit, a studio he grew to nearly 100 engineers building products for the likes of Disney and Hasbro before he stepped away.
Along the way came instructive disasters. A traffic app of his hit 200,000 daily users and then lost every one of them inside two days - a lesson, he says, in the cost of not staying focused. A food-delivery venture fell apart because the founders were not pulling in the same direction. He does not dress these up.
The through-line he pulled from those years is focus. "If we are catering to everyone, we are not catering to anyone," he has said about picking a customer. When Digitail finally wrote down exactly who it was for, he describes it as a moment when the whole team started rallying in the same direction. Focus, for Gabor, is not a slogan - it is the thing whose absence cost him 200,000 users.
Some of that steadiness traces back further than any company. Gabor grew up in post-communist Romania, the son of a doctor and an engineer. His parents ran a pharmaceutical distribution business that did well enough, for a while, to buy him Lego. Then it went bankrupt, and they had to raid his piggy bank to cover food. He came out of it with a conclusion that sounds simple and clearly is not.
That belief shows up in how he talks about co-founders and teams. The food-delivery collapse taught him that everyone building together needs to be in the same mindset and committed to the same long journey. It also shows up in an unusually plain admission for a CEO: that leaders need people around them willing to say when they are wrong, and that asking for help is a skill, not a weakness. "It's surprising how many people want to help," he says, "and unfortunately, they can't help if you don't raise your hand and ask for help."
Digitail's newer chapter is about artificial intelligence, and here Gabor draws a careful line. He splits AI tools into two kinds: human-in-the-loop features, like voice-to-text dictation that a vet reviews and signs off on, and fully automated ones, like an intake assistant that handles patient check-ins on its own. The brand name for this layer is Tails. His framing is that AI should act as a co-pilot that lowers the cognitive load on an overworked team, not a replacement for veterinary judgment.
That positioning is what investors bought into. In November 2025, Digitail announced a $23 million Series B led by Five Elms Capital, with existing backers Atomico, Partech, byFounders and Gradient joining in. It brought the company's total funding to around $37 million, aimed at expanding across the veterinary industry and pushing the AI-native platform further.
Away from the platform, Gabor is a three-time Ironman finisher, and he uses the sport as a working metaphor for how he runs a company. The parallel he draws is not about winning. It is about the discipline of showing up when it would be easier not to, because other people are counting on you to. Mornings go to exercise, evenings to reading and quiet, and a trusted inner circle exists specifically to give him honest feedback.
His advice to other founders fits the endurance frame: "Sometimes go slow to go fast," and, more bluntly, never give up. Coming from someone who watched 200,000 users evaporate and kept building, it lands less like a poster and more like a report from the field.
There is also a civic streak that predates all of this. Gabor co-founded Code4Romania, a volunteer-driven organization that builds technology for social causes - the same instinct to fix a broken system, pointed at a different target. Whether the problem is a government service or a vet clinic drowning in paper, his move is the same: find the outdated thing everyone has quietly accepted, and rebuild it.
The ambition he keeps stating out loud is modest in tone and large in scope. He wants veterinarians to spend most of the day with the animals and almost none of it fighting a computer. Somewhere in that goal is a first-time dog owner squinting at a sticky note, deciding that the whole thing could work better - and then spending years making sure it does.