Money is moving on AI claims.

Deals are being priced on models nobody outside the company has examined. Boards want an AI agenda nobody inside the company owns. Datatroph exists for both moments.

§ 01 · Diligence

Is the AI story real?

You're about to wire money against claims about models, moats, and data, and someone technical needs to read past the demo before it closes.

Technical due diligence and defensibility assessment of AI and machine-learning products: whether the model does what the deck says, whether the moat survives the next generation of foundation models, and whether the data advantage compounds or evaporates. The findings come back in the documents deal teams already use, which is a red flag report when you need a fast go/no-go and a full DD memo once the deal advances.

Where a claim needs testing rather than reading, Datatroph builds the evaluation harness, and it stays with you after the engagement.

Datatroph has been moving data and making it useful since 2008, across a wide range of industries. The AI work is recent and now accounts for nearly all of it, with a good deal on clinical and genetic data. Recent engagements include cancer-detection and therapy-target products, clinical scribing companies, AI products with no connection to medicine, and the buy side itself as a Venture Partner.

Brian Hur, who runs Datatroph, co-founded VetPronto and ran it as CEO through YC W15, and carried the P&L as CIO of a veterinary group in Australia; both companies and how they ended are in the record below.

§ 02 · Transformation

Lead the company into AI.

The board wants an AI story, the team is quietly worried about being replaced, and nobody owns the agenda.

This is work Datatroph has been paid to lead: listening to the business groups first; AI training built for what each team does every day; first prototypes off the ground with the CTO rather than around them; taking the one process a team repeats every day, the intake queue, the coding, the report someone writes by hand each week, and pointing the tools at that; and restructuring teams around what the tools now do, rather than leaving people to guess what it means for them.

The engagement form is a Fractional CAIO: embedded senior AI leadership on a retainer, owning the agenda without a full-time executive on the payroll, and the tooling built along the way (prototypes, evaluation tables, enablement material) outlives the engagement.

§ 03 · The record
Brian Hur, founder of Datatroph

Who runs it.

Datatroph has run since 2008 as Brian Hur and a bench of people he has worked with before; it is rarely just him. He is a veterinarian (DVM), an NLP researcher (PhD), and an operator. The research, writing, and projects behind the practice live at brianhur.com.

He built the first version of AI Mode at VIN, a clinical assistant over decades of veterinary clinical knowledge that cites the source of every answer and is used daily by practicing vets. He has published 22 peer-reviewed papers, and he has carried a P&L both as a CEO and as a CIO.

Co-founder & CEO, VetPronto (YC W15) · sold 2017
CIO, Love That Pet · later went into administration, sold for parts
Venture Partner, Vetted Capital
Acting Chief AI Officer, venture-backed startups · names under agreement
22 peer-reviewed publications · VetBERT, a veterinary language model, released publicly
§ 04 · Contact

Get in touch.

Evaluating a deal: say what you can about the target, the timeline, and what's keeping you up. Leading a company into AI: describe where the team is today and where the board wants it to be.

[email protected]