VetRec's 50-Clinic Australia Deal Signals AI Scribes Going Global
VetRec is rolling out its AI Scribe platform across more than 50 Vets Central clinics in Australia and New Zealand, after a pilot saved 200+ administrative hours across 1,300 visits. The deal signals AI documentation tools are moving from pilot programs to default infrastructure at multi-site veterinary groups.
More than 200 hours of clinical paperwork disappeared from a four-week pilot before this deal was even signed. That number is why Vets Central, an Australian veterinary group running more than 50 clinics, is rolling out AI-generated clinical notes across its full network this week, in partnership with VetRec.
VetRec expands into Australia and New Zealand
Vets Central and VetRec announced Tuesday that VetRec's AI Scribe platform is going live across more than 50 Vets Central clinics in Australia and New Zealand, following a four-week pilot that tracked 1,300 veterinary visits and saved more than 200 hours of administrative time. VetRec's platform generates SOAP notes, medical record summaries, and discharge instructions automatically from the clinical encounter, and integrates with the practice management systems clinics already run on.
Vets Central is an Australian-owned veterinary group with more than 1,400 team members and a Gold Coast headquarters, certified as a Great Place to Work. VetRec, based in the US, says its platform is HIPAA and SOC 2 Type II compliant and built to meet Australia's own privacy standards, with round-the-clock support for the international rollout.
Dr. Lachlan Campbell, Vets Central's chief veterinary officer, said the platform stood out during evaluation for clinical accuracy, ease of use, and the vendor's support during implementation. VetRec co-founder and CEO Kevin Cohen called Australia a critical growth market for the company.
Why saved minutes decide the AI scribe market
The 200 hours across 1,300 visits converts into roughly nine minutes of administrative time returned to each visit, an approximation built from VetRec's own two pilot figures over the same four-week period. Nine minutes doesn't sound like much until it's multiplied across a clinic that runs 30 or 40 appointments a day: it's the difference between a vet finishing notes after the last patient leaves and a vet finishing notes before the next one walks in.
That's the real product AI scribes are selling in veterinary medicine, not the transcription itself but the reclaimed minutes, and it's why the category has moved fast from novelty to infrastructure. The Underbite has already flagged AI scribe adoption as a tailwind pulling more diagnostic orders into structured records, and a 50-clinic international deployment is the clearest evidence yet that the tools have moved past pilot programs into default infrastructure at multi-site veterinary groups.
The broader veterinary technology market backs up the pace of that shift, even in categories AI scribes don't touch directly. A veterinary monitoring equipment market report from MarketsandMarkets projects the category to grow from $0.69 billion in 2026 to $1.03 billion by 2031, an 8.3% annual growth rate, with companion-animal applications alone accounting for 79.3% of that spend. The figure is a market-research estimate built from industry-expert input and the firm's own modeling rather than a tally of confirmed sales, and it covers monitors, not documentation software, but it points at the same underlying trend: veterinary practices are digitizing across every layer of the visit, not just the parts that touch a patient directly.
Neither company disclosed what Vets Central is paying for the rollout or how VetRec prices per clinic, so the deal's economics remain the one gap in an otherwise detailed release.
Whether AI scribes become a vet-group standard
Vets Central's deployment gives VetRec its first large-scale reference customer outside the US, and the clearest next signal is whether other Australian or New Zealand veterinary groups follow within the next two quarters. A second regional group signing on would suggest AI scribes are becoming default infrastructure for consolidated vet groups rather than a single operator's experiment.
The other thing worth tracking is whether Vets Central's own numbers hold at scale. A four-week pilot across a subset of clinics is a different test than a permanent rollout across the full network, and whether the time-savings ratio holds once every clinic and every vet is using the tool daily will say more about the platform's durability than the pilot ever could.
Other News
More stories shaping the pet industry this week. From funding rounds and product launches to regulatory shifts and retail strategy, stay ahead of what's driving the market.
Tucker's Buys Nugget's Healthy Eats, Its Second Brand Absorption This Year
Tucker's Raw Frozen Food acquired bone-broth brand Nugget's Healthy Eats in April, retiring the name and folding its formulas into Tucker's own lineup. It's the second time this year Tucker's has absorbed rather than kept an acquired brand, and the rebranded line debuts this week at SuperZoo.
VAFO Acquires Pets Deli as Its Founder Returns to the CEO Seat
VAFO Group has acquired Berlin-based D2C pet food brand Pets Deli on undisclosed terms, with founder Tania Moser returning as CEO after more than a year as chairwoman. The deal is the second involving a German pet food company The Underbite has tracked in two weeks, and it fits a pattern of manufacturers buying direct customer relationships rather than building them.
Nine Pet Companies that Made the 2026 Inc. 5000
At least nine pet-industry companies, led by veterinary network Petfolk's 2,016% three-year growth, placed on the 2026 Inc. 5000 list of America's fastest-growing private companies. Their range, from consolidated veterinary care to doodle-breed grooming, maps where pet industry money is actually moving.