From night shifts to a pitch stage in Visp

It's 2 AM. I'm fourteen hours into my shift. I've seen a dozen emergencies, done my rounds on the hospitalized animals, and all I want is to go home and sleep. But five consultation reports are still sitting in front of me. I can't push them to tomorrow, because my first appointments start at 8 AM. Each one takes fifteen to twenty minutes. So I stay, and I write.

If you work in a clinic, you know this scene. It's not the exception, it's most weeks.

I'm an emergency veterinarian in French-speaking Switzerland, and this is the problem I kept running into. Not a lack of skill or a lack of care, but software built before the cloud existed and never designed to take any of this weight off our shoulders. The documentation piles up, and small acts get missed in the invoicing along the way. So with my co-founder Nicolas, a cloud architect and security specialist, we decided to build the tool I wish I'd had: a complete practice management system with AI built in from the start, one that drafts the record, catches the acts we forget to bill, and still leaves every decision to the veterinarian.

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The whole thing took an unexpected turn a few weeks ago. I was contacted on LinkedIn by a startup pitch competition, the EyaPark Pitch Night VS. Without much hope, I applied. I was selected for the evening.

I won't pretend it wasn't intimidating. It was my first real pitch, alone in front of investors and a jury, alongside nine other startups whose founders all seemed very sharp. I arrived after a full day at the clinic and a two-hour drive, in a place I didn't know, in a world that isn't mine. I'm a veterinarian first, and the room spoke mostly German.

Then came the surprise. We won.

It's hard to overstate how encouraging that is when you carry your own doubts about a project. Beyond the award itself, which includes coaching and partnerships with the event's backers, the evening gave me something I didn't expect. People from the field to talk to, outside opinions, honest advice, new contacts, and a bit of visibility for what we're building.

We're working with our first pilot clinics now. Things are moving in the right direction. Now we just keep going.

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Victor Mignon is an emergency veterinarian in French-speaking Switzerland and co-founder of HelloRolly. Reach out at contact@hellorolly.com.