Seher Taneja, M&T’26, founder of Spoodle, is the recipient of the 2026 Dave A. Liu, M&T’93, and Lauren Wu Prize. Spoodle is an AI-powered clinical intelligence platform for veterinary medicine, which Seher says helps veterinarians “make faster, more informed clinical decisions by giving them citation-backed answers from peer-reviewed veterinary literature at the point of care.” In this conversation, she shares the inspiration behind her venture, the challenges of building a system veterinarians can trust, and how the M&T community has shaped her entrepreneurial path.
Q: Can you tell us a little bit about Spoodle?
ST: Spoodle is an AI-powered clinical intelligence platform for veterinary medicine. We help veterinarians make faster, more informed clinical decisions by giving them citation-backed answers from peer-reviewed veterinary literature at the point of care.
Today, veterinary information is fragmented across journals, PDFs, forums, and disconnected systems, making it difficult for vets to access reliable evidence during a busy appointment. Spoodle centralizes that knowledge into one intelligent platform designed specifically for real clinical workflows.
Better clinical decisions ultimately benefit not just veterinarians but also pet owners, who consider their pets family members. As the platform grows, we hope to improve how knowledge flows across the broader veterinary ecosystem, including clinics, researchers, and animal health companies.
Q: What inspired the idea behind your venture?
ST: The idea for Spoodle came from a combination of personal experience and time spent directly inside veterinary clinics.
I come from a family of doctors, so I grew up seeing medicine not just academically, but in practice – how important access to information is when making decisions that affect lives. At Penn, I became increasingly interested in building technology for healthcare, especially systems that could improve how professionals access and use knowledge.
When we first started working with veterinary clinics, we were building workflow software. But after spending months observing clinics and speaking with veterinarians, we realized the deeper problem was not workflow management – it was access to trustworthy clinical information in real time. Vets repeatedly told us they were making important decisions without having evidence easily accessible during appointments. That insight ultimately led us to pivot and build Spoodle into a clinical intelligence platform for veterinary medicine.
Q: What are some early technical or operational challenges you faced, and how did you overcome them?
ST: One of our biggest technical challenges was building a system that veterinarians could actually trust. Veterinary data is highly fragmented, and medical literature is difficult to structure and retrieve accurately. Early on, retrieval quality and hallucinations were major issues because, in healthcare, even small inaccuracies matter.
To address this, we focused heavily on improving retrieval accuracy, grounding responses directly in peer-reviewed literature, and designing the system to express uncertainty rather than generate unsupported answers. We iterated continuously with real veterinarians who tested the platform on clinical cases and gave us detailed feedback.
Operationally, another challenge was balancing rapid development while still staying close to users. Instead of overbuilding features, we shipped quickly, stayed deeply involved with clinics, and refined the product based on real-world workflows and case comparisons from veterinarians using the platform.
Q: How has the M&T Program directly influenced the direction or success of your start-up?
ST: M&T has fundamentally shaped how I approach building companies, but even more than that, it has shaped the person I am today as I graduate from Penn. Studying both Computer Science and Finance taught me how to think across technology and business – not just how to build products, but how to think about scale, incentives, strategy, and long-term impact.
But more than academics, the people in M&T have been the most meaningful part of the experience for me. Being surrounded by people who were constantly building, experimenting, and dreaming big made entrepreneurship feel very real. So many conversations, projects, and relationships through M&T shaped the way I think about product development, fundraising, leadership, and company building today.
Programs like the M&T Global Exploration course, where we met start-up founders and visited companies across India, also gave me real exposure to what building and scaling a company actually looks like in practice.
The support system within M&T has also meant more to me than I can fully express. Professor Gad Allon’s guidance and belief in what we are building, Professor Sangeeta’s constant support and encouragement, and the kindness and help from Caitlin and Desirae throughout the years have all played such an important role in this journey – not just in helping Spoodle grow, but in helping me grow as well.
Q: How will the Start-Up Award Help you achieve your goals?
DM: The Start-up Award would help us accelerate an important stage of Spoolde’s growth, especially by helping us secure licensed veterinary journal and research data partnerships, which are a major priority for us right now. Having access to high-quality clinical literature is critical to improving the accuracy and reliability of our platform.
The award would also help us continue building the product and expanding adoption among veterinarians as we transition into working on the company full-time.
Q: As you transition into working on your venture full-time, what milestone are you most focused on achieving in the next 12 months?
ST: Over the next 12 months, our main focus is scaling Spoodle from early adoption to becoming a platform that veterinarians and clinics rely on every day for clinical decision-making.
Over the next year, we want to grow that to over 1,000 active veterinarians through clinic partnerships and deeper integration into clinical workflows. We are also focused on improving retrieval quality and expanding our licensed veterinary literature base, making the platform even more reliable and valuable in practice.
Most importantly, we want to prove that Spoodle can become a trusted infrastructure for how veterinary medicine accesses and uses clinical knowledge.