AI exec deploys app to help treat, diagnose pets

Michael Nabers spent his youth in an exam room working alongside his father, a longtime veterinarian, helping comfort animals and pet parents as their sick dog or cat was receiving care. His father’s empathy and passion were ingrained in Nabers, who is applying his tech background to the pet health industry. 

“My experiences in application development have helped me understand the value of how a product should run and I always wanted to get back to entrepreneurship. Since the pandemic, I’ve realized my priorities in my life and wanted to use my knowledge for something purposeful,” said Nabers. 

Nabers, who previously lived in Gainesville before moving to Silicon Valley in his mid 20s, built mobile apps for global tech giants such as Samsung Electronics, digital music company Spotify and ride-sharing businesses such as Uber and Lyft. 

Earlier this year, Nabers started developing Umbrella Vet, an artificial intelligence-powered app to track and manage the health of pets. It equips the pet owner with the tools and analyses to determine the best course of action in a health plan. 

“AI is changing the way companies can be built in a horizontally. Applying AI to the pet industry means this area can reach animal care and nutrition on both the vet and pet parent sides. We created this venture studio to have multiple brands addressing different needs,” Nabers said. 

Umbrella Vet is working with the team at Tampa Bay Wave, a startup incubator and accelerator, and may participate in an upcoming tech cohort. The company’s co-founder, CTO and other executives are based in Tampa. 

“Florida is a large market in the pet care industry. Tampa Bay has the quality of life we want for our team, and we are seeing others relocate to the area like Cathie Wood [CEO of ARK Invest],” Nabers said. 

Nabers said he has watched pet parents struggle financially to cover medical expenses, spending $15,000 to $55,000 for dogs and $5,000 to $23,000 for cats per year. 

“We have a layer of information and data that’s free to users on the app, giving quality AI advice, and the ability to include licensed veterinarians into our platform,” Nabers said.

Via the app, vets can be contacted and jump on a messaging chat log or video call with the user. The collected information can also be shared with the local regularly visited vet. 

“We are beginning with a triage approach and giving at-home care advice. It starts with classification, a machine learning technique to identify the issues. We can then correlate different care topics under 50 verticals, fine-tune our model and provide vets our potential diagnoses,” Nabers said. 

“We are just at the beginning, but this gives us a great platform to launch and continue building out. For instance, there are challenges when it comes to access to payments for pet care. We are in strategic partnership discussions with companies we want to marry with for our platform.” 

The app is available on Apple and Android mobile devices with a $5 per month base subscription. 

Umbrella Vet previously raised a pre-seed round led by Bob Myers, the former general manager of the Golden State Warriors professional basketball team. 

“Investors are asking us about our 12-month road map, financial model and how we are ramping up our AI engineering team,” Nabers said. 

Umbrella Vet is currently seeking to partner with venture capitalists in the Tampa Bay area, as the company plans to raise a formal $5 million seed round.