Great science doesn't guarantee great investment. While many animal health founders focus on perfecting their pitch presentations, the real funding decisions happen based on factors that never make it onto slides: market validation, team composition, regulatory strategy, and business models that actually work.
This panel explores what investors really evaluate when assessing animal health opportunities.
The science to select livestock for feed efficiency, disease resilience, heat tolerance, emissions, and productivity simultaneously already exists. The industry stands at the threshold of a genuine transformation: moving from herd-level management toward individual animal intelligence, connecting breeding decisions to carcass outcomes and downstream buyer requirements.
The barrier is not scientific. It is commercial. Genetic value cannot be rewarded at producer level because the supply chain has no structural mechanism to verify, attribute, and share it. This session will explore what it takes to move from siloed decisions to a connected system where genetic and production data create verifiable, commercially rewarded outcomes at every stage.
What does a good tech stack look like? What’s the return practices are getting from evolving tech categories – retention, time, capacity, revenue…balance?
The rise of biologics has introduced manufacturing complexity that didn't exist a decade ago. Monoclonal antibodies, stem cell therapies and mRNA platforms all demand specialist capability, and the CDMO market is consolidating around it. We'll explore how manufacturing is moving from a back-office function to a strategic differentiator, and what that means for the make-vs-buy decision at every stage of development.
Precision livestock technologies promise labor relief, earlier disease detection, and better risk management. But adoption remains uneven. Many technologies succeed in controlled pilots yet struggle in the fragmented, margin-constrained realities of commercial production, where workflows, infrastructure, and operational culture vary enormously across systems and producer segments.
Scalable adoption runs through understanding the producer first. This session will explore what it takes to move from promising demonstrations to real-world adoption at scale: how producers make decisions, what workflows technology must fit into, what simplicity and interoperability actually mean in practice, and what commercially credible proof looks like across diverse production systems.
Expectations around care delivery and the veterinary value proposition are shifting, and both uncertainty and opportunity live in the spaces between. Contextualized care / spectrum of care recognize that the evolving needs of pet families will rely on a diverse set of veterinary and pet health offerings. Grasping the opportunities that sit outside the highest levels of care is a largely unmet opportunity for animal health organizations.
The regulatory environment for animal health is in flux. More products were approved in 2025 than in any year since 2021, expedited pathways are being used more creatively, and the growing wave of biologics submissions is testing frameworks that were built for small molecules. We'll explore how the landscape is shifting and what that means for companies with assets in development.