Jonathan Loesing still remembers the analog chaos of his first visit to a German veterinary clinic—paper files stacked in folders, handwritten appointment logs, no way to book online. It was 2021, and for someone who'd spent years at McKinsey advising healthcare companies on digital transformation, the disconnect was striking.
"We kept asking ourselves: why does this look nothing like modern healthcare?" Loesing recalled in an earlier interview. The answer, he and co-founder Julian Lechner decided, was opportunity.
Fast-forward to March 2025, and their startup—Rex Technologies—is raising a seed extension from Capnamic Ventures, Haub Legacy Ventures, Aligned Ventures, and others. The company isn't disclosing the size of the round, though it follows a €5 million seed announced back in July 2022, when Vorwerk Ventures led with backing from Picus Capital and Calm/Storm Ventures.
More revealing than the funding, perhaps: Rex now runs 13 tech-enabled veterinary clinics scattered across six German cities. That's up from earlier in 2024, and a far cry from the single Berlin-Friedenau location that opened in May 2022.
A Methodical Footprint
The expansion has been deliberate rather than explosive. Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Cologne, Frankfurt, Düsseldorf, Stuttgart—each represents a calculated bet that pet owners want something closer to what they've come to expect from their own doctors: online booking, telemedicine consults, digital records they can actually access.
Hamburg came online in July 2024, marking Rex's first move beyond the capital. By late 2024, the company had pushed into North Rhine-Westphalia, planting clinics in both Cologne and Düsseldorf. The pace suggests a team learning as it grows, testing what works before stamping out dozens of locations.
Loesing and Lechner—both former McKinsey consultants with stints in M&A, digital strategy, and private equity—aren't veterinarians themselves. They're operators who spotted an under-digitized corner of healthcare and decided to build the infrastructure themselves. That means proprietary software for scheduling and reminders, in-house lab equipment for faster diagnostics, and a client-facing app where owners can pull up vaccination histories without rummaging through desk drawers.
The Investor Angle
The backing tells part of the story. Beyond the institutional checks, Rex has drawn angels with relevant scar tissue: Vlad Lata and Julian Kley from Avi Medical, Florian Seubert from Zooplus, Simon Bolz and Simon Lorenz from Klara. These aren't passive observers; they've navigated healthcare operations, pet commerce, and patient software at scale.
A partner at Vorwerk Ventures said in 2022 that veterinary practices remain "highly under-digitized" relative to other healthcare verticals—a gap Rex is betting it can exploit before larger players wake up. Picus Capital, for its part, flagged the startup's software as a dual advantage: operational efficiency on the back end, slicker experience on the front.
Consolidation Without Much Innovation
The broader German veterinary landscape has seen plenty of M&A, less in the way of digital reinvention. AniCura was snapped up by Mars Petcare in 2018. IVC Evidensia has attracted backing from EQT, SilverLake, and Nestlé. Last September, Inflexion acquired Tierarzt Plus Partner in a deal reportedly north of €300 million.
But rolling up practices and modernizing how they operate are different challenges. Rex is wagering that technology—not just consolidation—can unlock value in a market where many clinics still rely on fax machines and paper charts.
What Growth Looks Like
The team has grown, too. Rex listed 25 employees when it announced its initial seed in mid-2022. LinkedIn now shows roughly 59, though exact headcount is always a moving target at startups. The company operates through separate legal entities in each city, with Loesing and Lechner named as managing directors across the network—a structure common in German healthcare but occasionally cumbersome when trying to move fast.
The new capital will fund more clinics and further platform development, the company says. Whether Rex will eventually look beyond Germany remains an open question; for now, the founders seem content building density at home rather than stretching thin across borders.
It's a quieter playbook than some venture-backed healthcare startups favor—less hype, more compounding. But in a market where simply offering online booking still feels novel, perhaps that's enough.
