Cast your mind back to 2020-2021; a time of unprecedented excitement, curiosity, and even mania around blockchain technology, cryptocurrency and NFTs. Web3, the next generation of the internet, was on the way and sparked endless conversations about how the world would change with this groundbreaking innovation.
The NFT (non-fungible token) market in particular grew 299% in 2020 reaching $250 million in value. Even the likes of Paris Hilton were captured by its mystique as it proclaimed to have revolutionary powers to turn the average person into a savvy investor and, ultimately, be the next big thing. In some countries, like Luxembourg, you could even use cryptocurrency as a viable payment method for everyday services, like taxis for instance. (This is still true today.)
But then, the tide shifted. Headlines moved away from crypto as a seismic game changer in the economic landscape. Instead, blockchain started to be seen as an underground technology with limited practicality. The ardent promoters of crypto and NFTs struggled to translate its appeal to the masses, leaving the broader population, myself included, feeling rather skeptical about the whole thing.
However, there was hope. In the background were three innovators—based in Switzerland and France—from the pet, technology and entertainment industries. They invented (potentially) the most user-friendly, practical and easily adoptable use for blockchain technology yet. They called it Dogamí Academy.
I had the pleasure of sitting down with Kristofer Penseyres, CEO and co-founder of Dogamí, to learn more about how they started, where they’ve been and their collaboration with Unleashed by Purina. This is their story.
The beginning
Dogamí Academy is a web3-based mobile game that allows pet lovers to adopt, train and compete with their own virtual pets. Your virtual dog is called a Dogamí and it’s a unique piece of digital art that cannot be replicated—in other words, a non-fungible token or NFT.
Kris Penseyres chuckled when I likened a Dogamí to a blockchain Tamagotchi. He explained, “Blockchain is like an automated notary service in the sense that it validates and approves transactions. And then those transactions are visible to all. That ensures security, visibility and transparency across all online transactions. With the blockchain, you can transfer digital assets and validate the transaction. In our case, the digital asset – the NFT – is a magical dog called a Dogamí. You can transfer it to another family member, sell, or trade and the blockchain will record the transaction”.
By selling or trading your Dogamí, you are engaging in the NFT market without really noticing. When you participate in races with your Dogamí, you earn the company’s proprietary cryptocurrency, $DOGA. You can also purchase more $DOGA, so you can upgrade your Dogamí’s appearance and magical powers to further your progress within the game. And therein lies the beauty of Dogamí as a vehicle for the expansion of blockchain technology and web3 concepts among average non-techy folks.
But it didn’t start that way.
Dogamí is the brainchild of three co-founders with wildly different backgrounds and expertise.
COO, Adrien Magdelaine, is an experienced pet entrepreneur having co-founded the popular French pet platform Wamiz in 2009.
CFO, Max Stöckl, brings the economics background as a former Boston Consulting Group consultant and an expert in the crypto space.
Finally, CEO, Kris Penseyres, is the entertainment connoisseur with over ten years in TV and film production and a subsequent five years in product marketing.
He said, “The spark for Dogamí came from trying to leverage the engagement and proximity that Web3 communities offer to build a community project around pet parenting and build real emotional connections with the characters and locations of the DOGAMÍ Universe for audiences worldwide”.
They launched the first iteration of Dogamí in July 2021 to a predominantly crypto-investor audience. After a couple of years of growing in this space, the team had broader ambitions.
“Three years ago, Dogamí was more appealing to crypto investors than consumers. It's the beginning of technology, the beginning of an opportunity and the beginning of a new market, so there was a fear of missing out, so to speak. Now, as time grows, we're moving more towards what we call consumer crypto which is basically an upgrade on the internet as we know it today to have real utility for everyday uses”, said Penseyres.
So how could they adapt the Dogamí Academy game to be more accommodating to non-tech non-blockchain enthusiasts? At the end of the day, it’s a colourful, racing mobile game, not a cryptocurrency trading platform.
As Penseyres put it, “We basically want people to use the technology without them knowing that they're using the technology. You play the game because you enjoy the experience, you enjoy the journey, and through gamification, the goal is that you're rewarded with assets that belong to you and that you can trade”.
To adapt the game to greater market adoption, the team needed to do more research.
That’s where Unleashed by Purina came in.
An Unleashed by Purina collaboration is born
In 2018, before Dogamí launched, Wamiz—the startup co-founded by COO Adrien Magdelaine—was acquired by Purina. This is how Adrien became acquainted with the Purina-verse and part of its community of innovators. So when the opportunity to join the Unleashed by Purina accelerator programme presented itself, the Dogamí team as a whole jumped at the chance.
Their goal? To see where the pet owner and gaming markets intersect and how they could adapt Dogamí Academy to appeal to both.
Penseyres said, “We spent the whole Unleashed by Purina programme doing case studies on both our audience and their audience. We discovered that 50% of our audience were actually pet owners. And 30% of Purina’s audience in France were gamers as well. So there was an immediate match”.
The data showed a promising link between gamers and pet parents, so a user-friendly mobile game was an ideal fit. The next step was to lower the barrier to entry for those unfamiliar with web3 technologies. This included removing wallet creations and other NFT-related logistics so that everything happens in the background.
This was part of the long-term strategy for the Dogamí team to reach a wider audience. Penseyres told me, “Today the technology has caught up to the vision, and we're able to make it so that anybody around the globe can play and has a very understandable and easy onboarding that is similar to mobile gaming as we know it today”.
I can attest to how simple it is to play. From creating my account to training my Dogamí, each step just felt like a normal mobile game, akin to a short Mario Kart game but with racing dogs through dynamic backgrounds. Simple to get started and spend hours on without so much as a passing thought about the revolutionary technology whirring away behind the scenes.
Collaborating with Unleashed by Purina further expanded the reach of the game. Not only because of the brand-name recognition but also two unique sponsorship opportunities.
The world’s first virtual pet food, called PurinaDOGASNAX, was introduced and launched in June 2024. These dog treats are in-game purchases you can buy and use to train your Dogamí. So far 340,801 PurinaDOGASNAX have been sold showing a viable ongoing commercial collaboration.
Purina has also been integrated as a main partner, within the game, as a sponsor of certain races. Much like you might see Rolex branding on the courtside of Wimbledon games, Purina’s branding graces the peripheries of the Paris track and other key in-game competitions.
Armed with the invaluable market insights, product development guidance and brand collaborations they gained during the Unleashed by Purina programme, the Dogamí team went on to adapt the gameplay to ensure free access for all. This change was pivotal to their success today.
Taking off
The take-off was both steady and immediate. Within the first three months of 2024, the game’s user base grew by 27 times.
At the time of writing, Dogamí has around 850 daily active users and 3,331 monthly active users from 158 countries.
Over 32,936 people have created accounts and adopted 76,509 unique Dogami.
A win for the founding team was seeing a rise in non-web3 fans using and loving the game, purely for the joy of playing it.
“We had 30% of our existing community that opened either a Discord account or created a wallet just to be a part of Dogami. That was the first sign that our positioning, our IP, and our language spoke to a larger and wider audience”, said Penseyres.
You might wonder if there is an element of “replacing” real pet ownership with virtual pet ownership, like when many of us in the early 2000s were given a Nintendog instead of a real puppy as children. But Penseyres assured me there are many pet parents in the community who often recreate their own dogs as Dogamí.
“What we want to be able to do is offer real value of entertainment, for all those that are within the pet-loving community, as a supplement to the passion that they have for their pets at home. In fact, one of the biggest requests we had in the beginning, even before we had the ability to select the breed of your Dogamí, was pet parents asking if their virtual Dogami could be modelled after their departed pets”.
This was how this writer decided to play the game (and subsequently spend hours on it). I created an avatar of my passed-on German Shepherd, Max. Immortalising him as a Dogamí, who is one-of-a-kind and irreplaceable, was deeply cathartic.
“Dogamí is a moment of voyage, it's a moment of escapism, it's a moment of joy and lightheartedness for young and older people around the globe. That's how we see it. I think there is maybe a market for virtual pet ownership, but that's not where we sit. We're a complement to the existing pet market”, said Penseyres.
From an NFT and cryptocurrency perspective, Dogamí has racked up an impressive track record with over 16,000 Dogamí NFTs sold and tens of thousands of daily $DOGA transactions.
Creating the game in the web3 space certainly has been a key driver of growth as the community is known for being close-knit and collaborative. You can tell by the stream of Dogamí memes on Discord that the heart of the audience are still web3 lovers.
However, it’s clear that the focus of the game has shifted from trading for investors to a universal entertainment experience for all.
Penseyres told me, “I think playing Dogamí Academy is a way to connect with a community of pet lovers. It's a way to make your real-life pets shine to people that you'd probably never meet otherwise. That's the beauty of the web3 community …The idea is that everybody gets a bit of the limelight”.
What’s next for Dogamí?
It can be a tough question to answer: what’s next for your startup? But CEO Kris Penseyres and his fellow founders pride themselves on clarity of vision and sharp long-term thinking.
When we spoke about future collaborations, Penseyres honed in on expanding the partnership with Purina, with the potential for PurinaDOGASNAX to become real-life treats for dogs around the world. Imagine picking up a pack of PurinaDOGASNAX in the supermarket for your pup and scanning it to have virtual treats magically appear for your Dogamí too. This would be pioneering a connection between the virtual and the physical worlds within the pet industry.
There are also opportunities the team can explore to integrate more pet parenting education and concepts into the gameplay as you raise and train your Dogamí.
Penseyres said, “If our platform allows for some kind of education on pet parenting and pet welfare through entertainment, that’s an automatic win for us”.
Long-term, the team’s ambitions remain on mass-market expansion and creating an entertainment IP with a broad yet loyal following. For Dogamí Academy, this means further tweaking the gameplay and onboarding to maximise ease of use and in-game satisfaction, while still appealing to those who want to earn $DOGA and trade Dogamí NFTs. It also manifests in new ways of bringing the Dogamí IP into the popular consciousness, such as releasing other means of entertainment beyond gaming.
In May 2024, Dogamí released the first edition of their comic book series “DOGAMÍ: Companions Of Earth" on Kindle. This crucial step into trans-media expansion could solidify Dogamí as a brand for multiple entertainment avenues in the future.
Dogamí animated Netflix series, anyone? (Stay tuned for 2026!)
Because of its obvious wide appeal, Dogamí has been a subject of fascination for those who’ve come across it, which has drawn many offers of collaboration and business opportunities. After all, who wouldn’t want their brand to be affiliated with adorable virtual superdogs? Fortunately, one of the founding team’s strengths has been focusing on its mission and not being afraid to say no.
Penseyres told me, “I think the greatest lesson of my entrepreneurial road is that not every opportunity is a good opportunity, and to only take steps in the direction that leads to your long-term strategy. Opportunities will come, and sometimes the best thing is not to take them”.
CEO Kris Penseyres, CFO Max Stöckl, and COO Adrien Magdelaine are united in carrying that ethos forward while continuing to expand their fun, magical dog racing brand into new and exciting places.
We at Unleashed by Purina are thrilled to have been a part of Dogamí’s journey so far and cannot wait to see what they do next.
Written by Olivia De Santos, Pet Tech Writer @ Unleashed by Purina