About Digital Empathy
Eleven years ago, “digital empathy” sounded like a contradiction.
In a world that increasingly sacrifices connection for convenience, how could you have both?
Well, here we are eleven years later, and our name still rings true.
The digital half never stops changing: search changed, then social, and now AI is changing how pet owners find and choose a vet altogether. The empathy half is what holds. It’s how we know what actually matters to a practice, the people inside it, and the pet owners deciding who to trust.
We know our practices by name, and we tell them the truth about what’s working. Our clients get people, not a ticket number: a team that picks up the phone, remembers your goals, and cares whether this year beats last year. Tools will keep changing. The way we treat the people who trust us won’t.
And when the digital half shifts, we face it head on. That’s what we’ve done before, and it’s what we’ll do again. This year, we pushed even further and became builders. The platform under every website we make, the intelligence that reads our clients’ calls, and more projects we can’t wait to show you: we built them ourselves, for vet med and nothing else. Digital does the labor. Empathy makes the judgment calls.
The world will keep changing. You’ll have a partner built to change with it.
A note from Robert
I’ve spent my whole career in veterinary marketing, and a lot of it inside a big corporate provider, watching the distance grow between what got promised at the top and what practices actually got. I started Digital Empathy because I thought practices deserved better: marketing built around what makes them worth choosing, from people who’d tell them the truth. Eleven years later, that’s still the whole idea.
Meet our leadership team
Our clients get people, not a ticket number: a team that picks up the phone, remembers your goals, and cares whether this year beats last year.
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Robert Sanchez is the founder and CEO of Digital Empathy, a philosophy graduate turned AI builder with a soft spot for animals and an insatiable curiosity about what’s next. He’s passionate about helping independent veterinary practices thrive and making life better for the pets, people, and veterinary teams they serve.
Robert spends his days putting AI to work, testing new ideas, and figuring out what veterinary professionals can actually use. As a co-host of The Veterinary AI Brief, he has helped listeners make sense of new developments and consider what’s possible in their own practices.
He’s rarely far from something new to learn or a Twitter rabbit hole worth investigating. Some might call his research habits an unhealthy obsession. Robert would probably call them Tuesday. He’s also a reluctant 49ers fan, though he continues to show up every season.
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Alie Cline is the COO of Digital Empathy and got her start in marketing by becoming Tumblr famous, back when that was a thing. She grew an art history blog to more than 250,000 followers and partnered with some of the world’s biggest art institutions before moving into digital marketing for nonprofits and small businesses.
She then made the leap into technology at Khoros, a social media software company, where she led the strategic services team supporting some of the world’s biggest brands with community moderation, social media strategy, social listening, analytics, and reporting. Through that work, she developed a deep love of customer experience and an appreciation for how much the little details matter.
After navigating a series of pet emergencies throughout 2020 (#WorstYearEver), Alie knew she wanted to be part of the veterinary community. Today, she oversees DE’s internal operations, finance, and customer success & support teams. She knows what it feels like to be the worried pet owner holding the other end of the leash and helps bridge the gap between veterinary teams and pet owners so that they can work better together.
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Dr. Jess Trimble is the VP of Veterinary Success at Digital Empathy, where she oversees content creation and provides the veterinarian’s point of view that keeps DE grounded in what independent practice owners actually need.
She comes by that perspective honestly. Jess grew up working in her family’s mixed animal practice in rural Illinois, and has since practiced in nearly every setting the profession has — large animal and small, on farms and in clinics, housecalls and urgent care, in farm towns and in downtown San Francisco. That range of experience means she understands the needs of the many types of practices that DE works with, and watching her family run an independent practice is why she cares deeply about their success.
Jess got hooked on technology-forward veterinary startups in 2016. She has advised founders, spoken and written on where clinical medicine and new tools actually meet, and co-authored the AVMA Guidelines for the Use of Telehealth in Veterinary Practice. She’s happiest finding new uses for automation and AI that make her colleagues’ work lives easier, improve patient care, and strengthen the relationship between a practice and its clients.
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Łukasz Kłobucki leads software engineering at Digital Empathy. An engineer by trade, he has spent more than a decade building software and leading engineering teams across very different worlds: a global cloud communications company, a fast-growing crypto fintech, and a small payments startup. Big-company process, small-company scrappiness, and a lot of lessons about what actually makes a team ship.
At DE, he applies that experience to a new kind of team. Much of the engineering behind DE’s products is done by AI agents that Łukasz directs: defining what to build and why, reviewing what comes back, and designing the systems that keep the work reliable and secure. He writes and speaks about agentic engineering as a discipline, and believes the old management fundamentals (clear goals, trust built into the system, feedback loops that actually close) apply to agents just as much as to people.
Based in Wrocław, Poland, Łukasz spends his evenings on the aikido mat or leading a choir he has run for over twenty years. At home he answers to a cat, a gecko, and a garden full of bees, and he takes animal welfare seriously right down to the smallest creatures. He still feels bad about the occasional spider. Good veterinary care matters to him, and that’s a big part of why he likes building for the people who provide it.
Digital Empathy at a glance
- 2015
- Founded · San Diego
- 600+
- Practices served across the U.S. and Canada
- Independent practices only
- Veterinary marketing agency
- Every price published
- Month to month, no contracts
- Technology we make ourselves
- Custom websites, SEO & content, Google Ads, call intelligence, and digital intake
- Robert Sanchez
- Founder & CEO · co-host of The Veterinary AI Brief podcast