Pet tech

1. 1. Winning and keeping trust

   → Consumers’ strong emotional connection with pets raises the stakes for things going wrong: US dog-walking platform Wag, for example, saw its investor SoftBank step back after allegations of animal abuse.

   → The larger challenge that startups need to grapple with is proving that their tech is actually good for pets. An automated dog-feeding kit is nice — until it breaks. And if the tech means owners spend less time with their pets, who’s winning?

2. 2. Give the dog a phone (or laptop)

   → Startups are not simply competing with vets by developing consultation chatbots, but actively courting them as their collaborators in telehealth offerings.

   → To really take off, startups need to wrap their heads around strict rules governing veterinary telemedicine and unify a highly fragmented vet industry.

3. 3. Startups look to collar the market

   → Wearable devices are focused on either GPS tracking or activity monitoring. The next step will be to fuse the two services into one device.

   → To do so, startups need to crack the code on battery life, which remains a hurdle when tracking multiple metrics and can discourage continuous use.

4. 4. All bark and no byte?

   → While there’s no shortage of data points on pets, startups are just now starting to figure out cause and effect between certain behaviours and health conditions.

   → To do so, insurance and pet health startups are increasingly partnering with each other to share their data, with the aim of ushering in a new age of preventative care for pets and lowering insurance costs for their owners.

Who early stage startups are up against