In 2020, our co-founder Elizabeth received the kind of news every pet owner dreads. Her French Bulldog, Lily, had been diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor. As a cancer biologist who had spent her career at the frontier of human oncology, Elizabeth knew what modern targeted therapy could do. But for canine glioma, no such option existed. The standard of care hadn't changed in years. The experience exposed something larger than one diagnosis. Companion-animal therapeutics has historically attracted a fraction of the R&D investment that human medicine commands. Yet the science is often already there — the targets validated, the mechanisms proven. What's been missing is a focused company to carry those breakthroughs across species and into the clinic. Together with her long-time collaborator Dan Knox, Elizabeth set out to build that company. They spent more than a decade together building Science Exchange — the R&D orchestration platform used by the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world, which was acquired in 2024. That experience taught them how to outsource intelligently and how to run lean, capital-efficient operations at scale. Familiar is the application of those lessons to a problem they care about deeply: ensuring the next generation of modern medicine reaches the animals who share our lives.