From at-home diagnostics to mobile groomers, our Unleashed by Purina 2024 cohort show us new avenues for the pet market.
Five years ago, the Unleashed by Purina programme was born to accelerate innovative EU-based startups to enhance the lives of pets.
But, in 2024, it’s fair to say that we’ve grown past our humble beginnings.
This year’s cohort of eight disruptive startups included representation from across Europe, Latin America, AOA and Canada, with technologies beyond our wildest dreams as start
up champions and pet parents.
We’re talking pain-detecting AI, mobile pet services, sustainable pet food protein and more.
Over 20 weeks, we took these pioneering startups and paired them with experts from across the Purinaverse that we affectionately call Purina Unleashed Champs. These Champs mentored our founders to hone their vision, perfect their product-market-fit and build a strategy for ongoing collaboration with Purina.
Each startup tailored their objectives to get the most from the programme, and we were blown away by their results.
Meet the class of 2024
On to Graduation Day, a balmy Friday afternoon in June. We sat on the edge of our virtual seats as our graduates presented their progress to their colleagues, Purina CEOs and Purina Champs.
Here’s what they revealed.
ZumVet – Personalised vet care from the comfort of your home
The graduation ceremony kicked off with ZumVet, a Singapore-based tech startup revolutionising the world of pet healthcare. The founding team designed a user-friendly app to connect worried pet parents to qualified vets via video call.
During the Unleashed programme, they identified more virtual services they could provide to help pet owners, such as managing medical records, selling pet care solutions on demand and triaging with an AI pain detector (in collaboration with fellow 2024 graduate Slyvester.ai).
Their Purina partnership focused on piloting a pet nutrition element to the app, offering Purina products as a preventative solution.
The results? Doubling their user base and improving add-to-cart metrics by 35%.
Top achievements:
- Increased target user base by 118%
- Created a proprietary AI model to streamline nutrition-based product recommendations
- Improved add-to-cart metrics for products by 35%
SylPro by Arbiom – High-quality, sustainable protein ingredient for pet food
Arbiom’s mission is to feed the world in a sustainable way. So it made perfect sense for the French startup to target pet food too. After all, studies show that pets consume a third of the meat produced globally.
To tackle this problem at the source, Arbiom created SylPro as a viable replacement for meat in pet food. Trials are ongoing but it has been successfully tested in both wet and dry food for dogs and cats.
A whopping nine out of ten cats – the pickiest of furries – preferred the SylPro feed over generic cat food.
Could this fit into Purina’s broader strategy for alternative proteins in pet food?
That’s what the team set out to discover.
During the Unleashed programme, the team validated volume fit, cost and sustainability goals. As Arbiom continue to work closely with Purina, they hope to validate the technical production aspects and further research into consumer acceptance and market fit.
Top achievements:
- Demonstrated volume fit and scale with a projected Purina share in Arbiom plants of 20% by 2030
- Created a long-term strategy to reduce SylPro's carbon footprint to 0.6kg CO2eq by 2034
- Made progress on consumer acceptance and labelling research
Pezz Life – At-home diagnostics and preventative care for pets
We’ve all felt the pain of a furry friend taking a sudden turn for the worst. That’s what Austrian-born health tech startup Pezz Life wants to save us from. With the widest range of accurate at-home diagnostic tests for pets on the European market, Pezz Life is bringing preventative healthcare solutions directly to pet parents.
During the programme, they honed their market research to identify the main verticals for their product: highly anxious pet parents.
These markets are more open to immediate solutions to any health concerns for their fur babies. This is where Purina’s Pro Plan products come in.
By engineering Pezz Life’s algorithm to make personalised food and supplement recommendations to customers, they saw a marked boost in online sales.
Top achievements:
- Validated that 52% of pet parents see at-home diagnostics as a valuable tool using survey data
- Achieved an average click-through rate of 18% on food and supplement recommendations
- Quadrupled food and supplement sales conversion rate
Pet Instincts – Remote pet care solutions for concerned pet parents
If you’ve ever felt guilty about leaving your pet home alone, Pet Instincts has a solution beyond just a pet camera.
Their first product, the Smart Pet Care System, is designed for dog owners to supervise, satisfy and soothe their dogs from their mobile phones.
With the Unleashed team, they focused on creating a batch of MVPs to begin at-home testing. So far, success! There has been a clear boost in the well-being of dogs and their owners using the system.
In the future, the Pet Instincts team envision a system that can release Purina products remotely, including food and treats. This would provide the pet parent with an instant solution (or distraction) for an anxious pup. And isn’t that what we all want?
Top achievements:
- Manufactured a pilot batch of products for at-home testing
- Improved the well-being of dogs home alone in test homes
- 10x engagement on social media and 30x website traffic
zazuu – The go-to app for all pet-related needs
Does your dog run and hide when the V-E-T word is muttered? Or maybe putting your cat into their carrier is always a losing battle.
zazuu is an all-in-one app where pet owners can order at-home services. Yes, that means at-home grooming, vet appointments, travel certificates and preventative care.
The zazuu pet care trucks are fully equipped to take licensed groomers, veterinarians and other pet professionals to your door. So far, the company has seen huge success in Brazil, servicing around 17,000 pets nationwide and earning $1 million in annual recurring revenue.
To build a partnership with Purina, the zazuu founding team saw a brilliant opportunity. Given that groomers are the first touch point for many pet owners using the app, what if they could identify health issues in pets during their appointments? From there, they could upsell zazuu veterinary appointments and make accurate product recommendations from Purina’s Pro Plan.
Top achievements:
- Solidified a strategy for grooming services as a first touch point for customers
- Created an online store to purchase Purina products through the app
- Achieved 40% growth in vet appointments and 26% growth in other appointments
Petexplorer – An online pet marketplace connecting pet parents to pet pros
PetExplorer wants to make finding vets, groomers and trainers in Greece easier than ever before. With their sleek online marketplace, pet parents can search for local professionals and book appointments.
To stand out from the competition, the Petexplorer team and Purina Unleashed Champs focused on adding features that customers would value.
Their research showed that verified reviews and an automatic booking process were the most valuable, which are now core features of the platform.
They also improved marketing channels and brand awareness, using a targeted social media campaign to boost the adoption of the platform.
Top achievements:
- Improved the online booking UI and added calendar integration
- 50% growth of vets using the platform
- 300% increase in website traffic and reached 1st page of Google
Slyvester.ai – Visual pain assessment tool for concerned cat carers
Do cats grimace? Apparently so! Slyvester.ai is an AI tool that can accurately detect pain from a cat’s facial expressions. Because cats are notoriously skilled at hiding their pain.
So far, despite the signature feline poker face, the tool has an 86% precision rate. The team are now working towards growing the database to train the AI with rare features like folded ears and flat faces.
We were most excited to see that, during the Unleashed programme, Slyvester.ai were able to surpass their target number of clinic adopters by partnering with expanding US-based vet groups like Petfolk.
As the technology advances, we await with bated breath the endless possibilities it could bring for pet owners worldwide.
Top achievements:
- Pivoted business model to focus on vet clinics
- Onboarded three major vet clinic groups and one telehealth platform to pilot the technology
- Improved technical accuracy of pain detection for cats with outlier features
CuidaMiMascota – Connecting pets with trusted sitters
The pet-sitting industry is projected to reach $5.14 billion by 2030, and CuidaMiMascota wants to own the LATAM share. Starting in Mexico, where 62% of families have at least one pet, was a great place to test the market.
With the Unleashed team, they focused on increasing brand awareness with both online and offline marketing strategies.
One of the most ingenious moves was to partner with local vet clinics to advertise the brand, as well as train junior vets to become sitters.
To incorporate the Purina brand, top sitters were given the “Purina Sitter” title to recognise their excellence. These sitters were also given Purina product samples to bring to clients, furthering brand awareness.
Top achievements:
- Honed the look and feel of the brand to communicate Purina partnership
- 8% open rate on email marketing campaign
- 3.1% click-through-rate on social media campaign
Furthering the Purina mission
Ultimately, we agree with the CEO of Nestlé Purina PetCare Europe, Jeff Hamilton: this cohort of Unleashed is more aligned with the future vision of Purina than ever before.
For example, we can see strong market viability for alternative proteins in pet food with Sylpro. This would hugely contribute to Purina-Nestlé’s global sustainability commitment to achieve Net Zero greenhouse emissions by 2050.
Purina-Nestle has long been interested in partnering with AI businesses, and Slyvester.ai is one of the most promising technologies we’ve seen.
There’s clearly an opportunity for Purina as a trusted solution for preventative healthcare in the case of zazuu, ZumVet and Pezz Life.
We were equally impressed with brand awareness initiatives dispensing Purina treats from a Pet Instincts Smart System or distributing Purina products through CuidaMiMascota pet sitters.
Despite the slowed growth of the pet industry following the historic boom during the pandemic, our startups have shown that the market is still responsive to new ideas.
Partnering with pioneering startups in their early growth phases continues to be an inspirational endeavour for us here at Unleashed and the Purina brand at large.
A special thanks to the Purina Unleashed Champs who continue to go above and beyond to help our startups achieve their goals.
We can’t wait to see how the startups develop their companies to better the lives of pets across the globe.
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See you in 2025!