Seeing Silicon | The ultimate battle between dogs and cats for VC money

Petcavich might be right. Founded in 2015, so far Meowtel has been able to raise less than $1 million in venture capital – about half of it given by angels and the rest by accelerator programs – before it became profitable this year. On the other hand, Meowtel’s rival, the most popular pet-sitting startup in the world, Rover – which started as a company focused on dogs and has recently ventured into cats – was acquired by Blackstone in a deal of $2.3 billion late in 2023.

In other fields, too dog startups keep making the news. Just a few months before, in March 2024, a dog longevity startup called Loyal raised a whopping $45 million in equity to bring its longevity drug for dogs to market. There’s more: ImpriMed, a dog oncology startup raised $23 million in November 2023; Fi, a smart dog collar startup raised $40 million in venture capital. As for cat startups, there’s limited capital and a number of ventures. The only one which raised money recently was Smalls, a fresh pet food company which was venture-backed at $19 million last year.

The entertaining playoff between dog and cat startups reminded me of the 2001 movie ‘Cats & Dogs’ where both sides – the dogs and cats - use spying tactics to play up an intense rivalry. Who will win this war, I wondered? For war, it is: for the wallets of pet parents.

A study by Michigan State University pegs the pet industry in the US at $303 billion in 2023, an increase of 16% from 2022. And the startup industry is there to serve. Other than pet-sitting and walking services like Rover and Meowtel, there’s startups that offer remote-controlled pet feeders, water fountains, GPS devices to track your four-legged friends, vegan food, medicines, and pet supplies online. Then there’s the healthcare and insurance industry for pets which includes employer benefits, home test kits and personalised pet monitoring apps.

However, both dogs and cats are equal contenders for this market in the US. According to the American Pet Products Association, 86.9 million households in the US own a pet. Dogs do remain by far the most popular with 65.1 million homes preferring them but cats are not too far behind at 46.5 million households. (Other pets like birds, horses, fishes and reptiles make up the rest).

So why are dog startups way more popular than cat startups? Could it be that venture capitalists themselves have a subconscious love for dogs?

“There is a widely held cultural belief that the pet species–dog or cat–with which a person has the strongest affinity says something about the individual’s personality,” said psychology professor Samuel Gosling in a paper which studied pet parent personalities at the University of Texas at Austin. He and his students concluded that that ‘dog people’ were more extroverted than ‘cat people’.

Could venture capitalists, most of them Type A personality types, be more of ‘dog people’ than ‘cat people’? There’s no research out there I could quote with confidence, but for now, I will conclude this battle with a simply stated fact.

From gifs to videos to photos, cats are definitely more popular when it comes to popular culture on the internet. Don’t agree with me? Take Cat-GPT (cat-gpt.com) as the latest example. It’s an entertaining sassy clone of chatGPT that serves cat GIFs in response to your queries and currently has more than 1 million users.

I asked Cat-GPT this question: “Why are dog startups more funded than cat startups”. Its answer is accompanied by a gif of a kitten jumping out of a cardboard box: “Meow. Meow meow meow. Meow, meow meow meow meow, meow.”

Not the kind to give up, I tried again with the question: “Who is more popular on the internet, cats or dogs?” This time it served up a gif of a tiny cat popping out of a sofa corner and glaring at me. “Meow. Meow meow, meow,” it answered knowingly. Case closed.

Shweta Taneja is an author and journalist based in the Bay Area. Her fortnightly column will reflect on how emerging tech and science is reshaping society in the Silicon Valley and beyond. Find her online with @shwetawrites. The views expressed are personal.