For startups bridging AI and animal health, early commercial validation can be the difference between momentum and stalling. Bernardo Petriz, CEO & Co-Founder of Peptidus Biotech, shares how Peptidus secured its first seed round, engaged directly with livestock producers in Brazil, and built industry credibility through programmes like vHive, to move from discovery platform to commercial pipeline.

Derick Whitley, CEO of TRAVV, shares how strategic AI adoption across operations is allowing them to achieve more with their raised capital than previous generations of startups. From automated coding and brand development to administrative workflows, he reveals which AI applications are delivering the highest ROI for resource-constrained companies and how this operational approach is creating competitive advantage in scaling diagnostics services.

Cat Health Corp. pursued a non-traditional multi-API drug strategy, overcoming investor resistance and building a faster path to clinic by leveraging existing compounds and novel combinations. This session will explore why unconventional drug models face pushback, how existing molecules can accelerate development timelines, and what founders need to do to bring investors along on non-traditional strategies.

Functional nutrition is shifting from a performance input to an integrated management tool across health, immunity, and resilience. The challenge is not the science. It is translating it into validated, commercially representative studies that hold across the variability of real production systems and demonstrating economic value clearly enough that producers and supply chain partners are compelled to act. This session will discuss:

• Integrated value across health, performance, and resilience: where the greatest opportunity sits
• Why ROI remains hard to prove in commercial systems and where the validation models fall short
• How variability across genetics, geography, and management undermines translation from trial to farm
• What collaboration across producers, feed companies, and animal health partners needs to look like
• The role that nutritionists and veterinarians play in bridging innovation and on-farm decisions

Therapeutic nutrition is one of the largest underleveraged opportunities in companion animal care. The evidence base is growing, new data infrastructure is making outcomes measurable for the first time, and pet owner appetite for nutrition-led health solutions is clear. This panel explores what it takes to make nutrition a more integrated, measurable, and commercially sustainable part of clinical practice.

• The evidence base for therapeutic nutrition: where it's strong and where the gaps are
• Using outcomes data to make the clinical case for nutrition recommendations
• Pet owner demand and how practices are, and aren't, meeting it
• Communicating value and price in a category where D2C competition is growing
• What a genuinely integrated nutrition strategy looks like inside a practice