Digital ecosystem + NFC hardware for a new category of pet care.

Rudel is launching a new category in pet care: a physical NFC tag attached to the pet that, when scanned, opens a complete digital profile — vaccines, medical history, owner contact, lost-pet flow, vet appointments. The team needed a partner who could land the entire system end-to-end: app, backend, AI assistant, and the integration with the physical hardware.

We started with a discovery week to map the full system: NFC scan flow, owner onboarding, clinical history management, lost-pet recovery. From there we wrote the architecture document — Flutter for the mobile app (one codebase for iOS and Android), Node.js on Google Cloud for the backend, Firebase for data and real-time sync.

We work in two-week sprints with a Friday demo for the Rudel team. Every demo runs against the staging environment. Decisions are documented in ADRs the client owns from day one.

Rudel includes an AI assistant owners can ask about their pet — symptoms, medication doses, food recommendations, when to see a vet. The integration is not read-only: with structured outputs, the assistant writes back into the app — creating reminders, logging clinical entries, and booking appointments — always with the owner's confirmation before it touches the record.

When the owner uploads external clinical history — vet PDFs, photos of vaccination booklets, loose documents — the AI organizes it inside our own data domain: vaccines, episodes, medications and labs land structured in Rudel's own model, not as opaque attachments. We also automate the way out: the owner downloads their pet's full clinical history as a formatted PDF, ready to bring to a vet appointment.

It all runs on a frontier LLM API with strict guardrails: every veterinary recommendation includes a disclaimer and a clear path to a real vet.

Rudel is in production. Real owners and real pets scanned through real NFC tags. The system is in active development — we keep shipping features alongside the Rudel team.

We picked tools we already knew well and tuned them. One Flutter codebase for both phone platforms; Firebase as the system of record and real-time layer. The AI assistant is a thin layer on top of a frontier LLM API with strict structured-output schemas.