What Is Lupa? Veterinary PIMS Overview (2026)

It is 6:40 on a Thursday evening. The last appointment left forty minutes ago, and an associate is still at the treatment room workstation, finishing four SOAP notes from memory while the front desk reconciles a payment that went through the card terminal but never posted to the invoice. Somewhere in that practice, someone is wondering whether a newer system would make evenings like this rarer. That question is why so many people are searching "what is Lupa." The short answer: Lupa (sold under the Lupa Pets name) is a cloud-native veterinary practice management system, built by a London-based company founded in 2023, that bundles the core PIMS together with an AI scribe, an AI assistant, client booking and messaging, and a pet owner mobile app in one platform.

This article is published by VetSoftwareHub, an independent vendor-neutral directory with no financial relationship with any of the companies covered here. We do not accept referral fees or equity positions, and we do not steer practices toward any particular product. What follows is a plain-language overview of the landscape.

What is Lupa, and what does it do?

At its center, Lupa is a practice management system in the traditional sense: scheduling, medical records, invoicing, inventory, reminders, and reporting. What sets its positioning apart is how much it folds into that core. Lupa describes its product as a veterinary "operating system" and says it replaces more than seven separate point solutions, including the PIMS itself, a client mobile app, an in-patient tool, and an AI scribe. The company's pitch is consolidation: fewer vendors, fewer logins, and fewer places where data has to be re-keyed.

The AI layer has two named pieces. Lupa Notes is an ambient scribe that turns a recorded consult into a draft clinical note, and it has been offered as a standalone product, which gives practices a way to try the company's software before committing to a full system change. Jerry is the in-app assistant, pitched as a co-pilot that surfaces operational insights and clinical suggestions. On the client side, Lupa includes online booking with intake questionnaires, two-way messaging, payments, automated reminders, and a pet owner app with a digital health record. Lupa claims onboarding can be completed in under a day and that each vet saves roughly 60 minutes per day within the first week. Treat those as vendor figures until you hear them confirmed by practices of your size and type.

The company itself is young and moving fast. Lupa was founded by Nicolò Frisiani, Matei Bjola, and Raul Lozano Martin, raised a roughly $4 million seed round in early 2025, and followed it with a $20 million Series A led by Singular in October 2025, bringing total funding to about $25 million. Part of that money is going into what Lupa calls a Veterinary AI Lab, a research and product group focused on AI tools across the care pathway. At the time of the Series A, Lupa reported more than 200 independent clinics on the platform, along with multi-year agreements with veterinary groups in the UK and Europe.

What is Lupa's place in the veterinary software stack?

Lupa sits in the Practice Management category, specifically in the cloud-native segment: browser-based software with no on-premise server, vendor-managed updates, and access from anywhere. If you are still sorting out what that model changes in daily operations, our cloud PIMS guide walks through the tradeoffs.

The more interesting stack question is what Lupa tries to absorb. Most practices run a PIMS plus a ring of add-ons: a client communication platform, an AI scribe, an online booking tool, sometimes a separate inventory or analytics layer. Lupa's design aims to bring most of that ring inside the core product. That changes the integration math. Instead of asking "does this connect to our reminder vendor," you are asking "are we comfortable retiring our reminder vendor." Practices that have strong existing client engagement tools should weigh that carefully, because the value of an all-in-one depends on actually turning the other tools off.

For the pieces that stay outside, Lupa lists integrations with diagnostic labs (IDEXX among them), distributors such as MWI and the UK's National Veterinary Services, Zoetis, accounting software, and communication infrastructure like Twilio. Note that several of these are UK-centric, which matters for the next section.

Who Lupa is suited for

The honest answer is that Lupa's track record so far is concentrated in the UK and Europe. The company's early growth came through UK independents and an exclusive partnership with Vetsure, a UK buying group with more than 1,200 member clinics. Its multi-year group agreements are with UK and European operators. Lupa has started courting US practices, including an AAHA Mission Partner relationship advertised on its website, but US installs, US references, and US-specific integrations are still thin compared with its home market.

With that context, it helps to think about three categories of practice that might look at Lupa:

General practice independents, especially newer or single-location clinics, are the profile Lupa has served most often. A practice that is opening fresh or currently stitching together five or six tools gets the clearest benefit from consolidation.

Small multi-site groups are a stated target. Lupa markets central control over pricing, inventory, and workflows with per-site flexibility, which are the problems multi-site groups usually raise. Whether it handles your specific structure is a demo question, not a website question our inventory management guide covers what multi-site inventory should actually look like.

US practices considering an early-adopter position are the third category. The product may well fit, but you would be among the earlier US customers, which means more weight on reference checks, contract terms, and confirming that your US lab, distributor, payment, and controlled substance logging requirements are fully supported today rather than on a roadmap.

Specialty, emergency, equine, and mobile practices have not been a visible focus. If that is you, confirm fit for your caseload early in the conversation.

How Lupa compares to alternatives

At a high level, Lupa is one of several cloud-native PIMS options competing for practices that want to leave older server-based systems behind. Three useful reference points:

ezyVet, owned by IDEXX, is a longer-established cloud PIMS with a US and international customer base, IDEXX lab integration, and adoption among larger and multi-location practices. It is a common reference point for any newer cloud entrant.

Shepherd is a US-built cloud PIMS with a following among independent general practices, positioned around fast, modern workflows for day-to-day clinical work.

NectarVet is another cloud-native entrant focused on modern, browser-based workflows for independent practices.

The difference in emphasis is that Lupa leads with AI and consolidation (scribe, assistant, client app, and PIMS from one vendor), while others may lean on maturity, integration breadth, or a specific workflow philosophy. None of that makes one universally a better fit than another; it depends on your practice. For side-by-side context across the category, see our 2026 PIMS buyer's guide, and browse the full Practice Management category

Lupa pricing and how to evaluate it

We could not find published list pricing for Lupa at the time of writing, so expect a quote based on practice size, number of users or doctors, and which modules you take. The company's marketing frames its value in replacement terms, claiming practices save over $4,000 a year by retiring standalone tools and recover more than $12,000 a year in vet time. The way to test those numbers is to build your own five-year view: current software spend, migration and training costs, payment processing rates, and what you would actually cancel. Our 5-year TCO calculator is built for exactly that exercise. 

In a demo, push past the slides and ask:

• How many US practices are live on Lupa today, and can we speak with two or three of similar size and caseload?

• Which of our current lab, distributor, payment, and imaging integrations are live in the US now, and which are planned?

• Can you run a real consult through Lupa Notes, start to finish, and show how a vet edits and finalizes the draft?

• How is controlled substance logging handled for US DEA requirements?

• What does a migration from our current system look like, what data comes over, and what stays behind?

• Who owns our data, how do we export it, and in what format if we ever leave?

• How are AI outputs reviewed for accuracy, and where is clinical data stored and processed?

Before the demo, write down how your team actually works today; it makes these questions much sharper How to Document Your Current Workflows Before Replacing Software.

After the demo, the reference calls matter even more than usual for a newer vendor, How to Check References for Veterinary Practice Management Software. 

So, what is Lupa?

Lupa is a well-funded, fast-moving, AI-first cloud PIMS that is trying to collapse the usual stack of add-ons into a single platform. Its strengths on paper are consolidation and speed of adoption; its open questions, especially for US practices, are maturity outside its home market and depth of local integrations. Neither of those is a verdict. They are simply the things worth verifying before a decision that will shape your practice's daily operations for the next five to ten years. If you are weighing Lupa against other systems and want a structured, vendor-neutral process for the comparison, that is the work the PIMS Selection Navigator was built for.