Who We Are

Kate Skufca Doster is an environmental scientist and MBA with a gift for pattern recognition and an inability to let something go until it makes sense. She didn't set out to build a company. She set out to figure out her horse.

Charlie is a Norwegian Fjord gelding with a complicated health history; years of fragmented records, unanswered questions, and symptoms that didn't add up until Kate refused to stop looking. When she finally connected the dots, everything changed. EPM. Confirmed chronic Lyme. Cervical spine changes. Metabolic risk. Five years of pieces that finally became one clear picture.

She built Charlie Connection Project because no owner should have to do that on their own.

Kate didn't build this alone. Alex Uspenski brings over twenty years of biomedical engineering and R&D, learning how complex systems fail and how to find out why. He is also an endurance rider and self-taught hoof trimmer, so he lives the overlap of performance, biomechanics, and horse health every day. When his own horse faced a crisis nobody could diagnose, he worked it out himself.

Jesse Doster is the software developer and platform architect behind the scenes. Two decades building at every level of the stack, now building the infrastructure that holds this work together. He doesn't ride, but as a lifelong animal lover he understands exactly why the health of the animals we love is worth this much care.

Charlie Connection Project is an integrated equine health analysis service. Kate built the methodology and works with a small team of advisors to build Connected Care Files for horses with complex or unresolved health histories. We don't diagnose. We connect the dots.

Charlie’s Communication Buttons

Building Charlie's own Connected Care File taught Kate something uncomfortable. The most useful document in the whole file was not a scan or a lab result. It was her daily log of what she noticed. Which meant the best data on a complicated horse depended on how well one person could read him. And Charlie is stoic. He hides discomfort.

So in June 2026 she gave him communication buttons, to see whether he could report on his own body directly rather than waiting for someone to spot it.

It is an open observation project, running under a pre-registered protocol. Every press is logged. Nothing is claimed that the data does not support. She is not selling a method and she is not teaching one. She is collecting evidence in public, and she will say so when it does not work.

Charlie is the proof of concept. Your horse could be next