When Joe Spector’s corgi, Eddie, ate four M&Ms, the Hims cofounder spent hours trying to find an emergency vet who could see him. One office pointed him to a pet poison hotline, and another was an hour away and had a four-hour wait. The bill came out to $2,000.
Spector thought at the time “this does not have to be that way,” he told Fortune.
That stressful scramble in 2021 sparked the idea for Dutch, the veterinary telehealth company Spector launched on July 1 of that year after helping build and take public Hims & Hers, the direct-to-consumer telehealth brand best known for treating hair loss and sexual wellness. Those companies have since grown exponentially to cover an array of health concerns.
Dutch, which just marked its fifth anniversary, offers members video visits with veterinarians for a flat $100 a year covering up to five pets. That amounts to roughly the cost of a single in-person visit at a regular veterinary office. The company now operates in 35 states, up from eight at launch, as more states loosen restrictions on veterinary telemedicine. The company has logged millions of interactions and now counts more than 100,000 active members, according to the company. Dutch raised $20 million in early 2022 to scale the platform, in a round led by Forerunner Ventures.
The company declined to share its current revenue and valuation, but its revenue grew 5.5x between 2022 and 2023, 2.2x between 2023 and 2024, and 1.8x between 2024 and 2025.
Firing his agency to grow the business
Although Dutch is clearly charting its growth path now, it was a bit stagnant for a while. Now Spector is making a bigger bet on how the company markets itself.
Late last year, Spector said, Dutch was paying an outside agency roughly $50,000 a month to produce five pieces of creative material, or about $10,000 apiece.
“It’s both expensive and it’s just limited because so much of marketing, especially with a new product, is just testing to see what’s resonating,” Spector said.
So he fired that agency. That drastic move is somewhat reminiscent of Bolt’s CEO telling Fortune at its Workplace Innovation Summit in May he had ditched his entire human resources team, although the executives had very different motivations for their moves.
In its place is a new in-house marketing team leaning heavily on AI tools to generate content, from static ads to full animated and live-action commercials. Now Dutch produces about 50 pieces of content a month internally, or a 10x jump, Spector said. That’s enough work to cost roughly half a million dollars a month through an agency, he said. Just as important as the savings, he said, is the ability to test what actually lands with pet owners who often don’t know virtual vet care exists.
“We have to get over the trust factor,” he said. “We have to educate consumers on how this even works, or like what’s the use case.”
Dutch’s presence on Meta has grown from about 5% of its ad spend to roughly one-quarter. Since the new team’s first full month, the company has cut its customer acquisition cost by 20%—comparing January 2026, before the team started, with April—and grew its audience 20% month over month from February to March, according to the company. Spector said Dutch is also using AI on the measurement side, for A/B testing, brand-lift studies, and its search strategy.
To be sure, Spector is quick to credit the people, not just the software.
“I shouldn’t take the credit—it’s the marketing folks,” he said. The team, he added, is what makes leaning into the tools possible.
For Spector, the goal is to move Dutch upstream. The company built its early growth on bottom-of-funnel Google search, reaching pet owners in the middle of an emergency, he said. Now he wants to grow brand awareness, so that owners think of Dutch before the crisis hits.
That’s partly why Dutch brought on former Olympic figure skater Tara Lipinski as a brand ambassador. Lipinski, Spector said, came to Dutch as a customer after losing her home in the Los Angeles fires and needing care for her dog.
“One of the feelings I want people to have is this sense of relief,” Spector said.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
