A man, a roommate, and a dog that wouldn't get better
Before the Super Bowl spot and the billion in revenue, there was a kitchen in New York and a Rottweiler named Jada who couldn't keep her food down. Jonathan Regev was crashing at his roommate Brett Podolsky's place, watching Brett cook fresh meals on the stove every day because a vet had finally suggested the thing the entire pet food aisle had not: just make it yourself.
The dog got better. The two of them got an idea. That idea is now The Farmer's Dog, the fresh, human-grade dog food company Regev runs as co-founder and CEO. It ships pre-portioned, vet-formulated meals to dogs' doors on a subscription, and as of early 2025 it had crossed $1.2 billion in annualized net revenue and turned profitable - a rare combination in direct-to-consumer.
One of the main reasons we've been successful is because our founding story and the mission of the company is authentic.- Jonathan Regev
The Birthright trip that started a company
Regev and Podolsky met in 2014 on a Birthright trip to Israel. They hit it off, ended up living together in New York, and the Jada saga unfolded under the same roof. The partnership has a clear division of labor that Regev describes plainly: he leads from the front, focused on vision and the future, while Brett takes care of the pack. Two distinct styles, he says, that built the culture.
Regev did not arrive at dog food by accident. He had studied business at UC Berkeley's Haas School and at Bocconi in Milan, passed through the Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship at Berkeley, consulted at Bain & Company, and served as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Rocket Internet - the Berlin startup factory that, during his time there, launched HelloFresh. The meal-kit-by-subscription model was already in his bloodstream. He knew the landscape. He felt comfortable building something adjacent to it.
The patience to wait a year
Here is the part most founders skip. Regev and Podolsky spent more than a year figuring out exactly what they wanted to build before spending a dollar on infrastructure or raising a round. In a world that worships the fast launch, they bootstrapped and planned. The payoff was a supply chain and technology stack that gave them better unit economics than a company that had simply thrown money at the problem.
We spent over a year trying to figure out what it is that we wanted to build before spending a dollar in any infrastructure or raising money.- Jonathan Regev
That patience extended to manufacturing. The pair wanted to make dog food in a human food facility - which sounds reasonable until you call factories and they say no. They called more than 200 of them. Eventually one said yes, and The Farmer's Dog became the first pet food company to produce its meals in a human-grade food plant. They launched to customers in July 2016, two years after the first home-cooked batch for Jada.
Nail it, then scale it
Regev's operating philosophy is compact enough to fit on a sticky note: the best companies nail it and then scale it. Get the product and the experience right for a small group of customers first. Only then pour fuel on it. The company obsessed over the unglamorous mechanics - making reordering seamless so an owner never has to scramble when the fridge runs low, portioning each pack precisely, keeping the cold chain intact from plant to porch.
The scarcity helped. When resources are limited, Regev says, you're forced to be creative. The bootstrapped years bred the kind of constraint-driven invention that a fat seed round tends to anesthetize.
The best companies nail it and then scale it.- Jonathan Regev
The Super Bowl gamble
In February 2023, The Farmer's Dog ran its first national Super Bowl commercial. No celebrity. No gimmick. A spot called "Forever" that simply followed a girl and her dog as both grew older together, with the quiet promise that better food buys more years. It won USA Today's Ad Meter - the audience-voted ranking of every ad in the game - beating spots that cost far more in star power. For a company built on authenticity over influencer budgets, it was the thesis proven on the biggest stage in American advertising.
On marketing, Regev keeps it blunt: it's not about paying influencers, it's about keeping the authenticity intact. The brand resonates, he argues, because customers can feel that the founding story is real. The dog was real. The problem was real. The fix was real.
The harder decision than launching
Counterintuitively, Regev has said the decision to raise outside capital was one of the hardest the company faced, precisely because it was already profitable. Different growth stages called for different investor partners, and his bar was specific: investments had to provide value, not just money. The company has raised over $168 million in total, including a $65 million Series D in 2021, while keeping a tight grip on the economics that made it work in the first place.
Today The Farmer's Dog employs roughly 900 people, with offices in New York, Boca Raton, and Nashville. Its stated mission is bigger than any single product: to reimagine how people care for their pets through technology and simplicity. The fresh food was just the opening move. As Regev frames the work, most challenges get a lot easier once you surround yourself with incredible people - which is as close to a personal credo as he offers.
Most challenges become much easier to solve when you're surrounding yourself with incredible people.- Jonathan Regev
It is a tidy arc for a founder who started by watching someone else cook. The roommate became a partner. The dog became a customer base. The home-cooked workaround became a category. And the man who said he leads from the front spent the first year refusing to move until he knew exactly where he was going.