Ask A Vet Premium GPS, Health, and Training Tracker

Hi, I’m Dr. Duncan Houston, BVSc — an emergency vet and lifelong pet-product tinkerer.

Long before clinics and prototypes, I was the kid breeding fish and shrimp, obsessed with tiny ecosystems and how small changes affect living things. Later, as a semi-professional triathlete and cyclist competing internationally and even lived in Belgium for cycling while studying, I learned how data makes the invisible visible, you can feel when something’s off, but numbers explain why.

That mindset followed me into emergency medicine. After nearly a decade practicing across Australia and Hong Kong, I saw the same problem again and again: we find pets too late, and we don’t have enough context when they arrive.

Ask A Vet started as a house-call service, then became an app — because the most important health data lives at home: sleep, movement, appetite, behaviour, the “something’s not right” moments owners notice first. But software alone wasn’t enough.

So we built hardware.

Along the way, I didn’t do it alone. My business partner is my mum — the calm voice, the spreadsheet brain, and the one who (lovingly) tells me when I’ve over-engineered something. We’ve folded boxes at the kitchen table and celebrated wins that looked tiny from the outside, but kept the mission moving.

I eventually moved to Hong Kong for one reason: to be close to the people who actually build things. My days often looked like this — prototyping in the morning, ER shifts at night.