veterinary
(3)
Ted Sprinkle
Ted Sprinkle, DVM, is a Cornell-trained veterinarian turned serial entrepreneur who has spent the second half of his career building veterinary consolidators that buy community animal hospitals while leaving their culture intact. He co-founded Encore Vet Group in 2018 with his son Lance and Bo Iler, and led it as CEO through a growth run to roughly 2,200 employees before transitioning to executive chairman in late 2025. Before Encore he founded Healthy Pet Corp. (sold to VCA in 2007) and Pet Partners, and earlier ran a leading thoroughbred operation. His pitch is unusually simple for an acquirer: put people first and the medicine, the clients and the numbers follow.
Gavin Cotter
Gavin Cotter is the founder and CEO of Koala Health, a Boston-based digital pet pharmacy that delivers chronic pet medications through a mobile-first platform built to work directly with pet parents and their veterinarians. An MIT-trained mechanical engineer turned operations leader, he cut his teeth scaling PillPack's pharmacy operations before Amazon acquired it, then reassembled a core PillPack crew in 2021 to do for animals what PillPack did for people: make managing medications boring, easy, and reliable. Koala has since expanded to all 50 states and raised a $20M Series B led by Valspring Capital in 2025.
Celine Halioua
Celine Halioua is the founder and CEO of Loyal, a San Francisco biotech company developing the first FDA-approved drug for lifespan extension - starting with dogs. Born in Austin, Texas to a Moroccan mother and German father, she studied neuroscience at UT Austin and nanotechnology at Uppsala University before pursuing a DPhil at Oxford on the health economics of gene therapy. She left Oxford to join Laura Deming's Longevity Fund as Chief of Staff, then founded Loyal in 2019 at age 24. With $250M+ in total funding and the largest clinical trial ever conducted in animal health (1,300+ dogs across 70+ clinics), Loyal's lead drug LOY-002 has cleared FDA safety and efficacy hurdles - putting it on track to become the first longevity drug ever approved for any species.