Maya Shaposhnik Cadena has a talent for ending up in rooms where the instructions are incomplete. At 18, the room was the Israeli military, where she taught infantrymen how to work with weapons, armored personnel carriers and field tactics. At 20, it was her own event-planning company, launched in Israel with the breezy confidence of someone who had already been trusted with consequences. Later came fundraising offices, an MBA classroom, investor meetings, pet resorts and a succession of whiteboards bearing increasingly revised versions of Vetted Pet Health.
Across those rooms, her job has remained oddly consistent: understand the situation, make the next move clear and persuade other people to move with her. Vetted, the company she founded while at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, is the latest and most public expression of that instinct. Its form has changed repeatedly. The central question has held: how might everyday pet owners become more informed and more consistent between moments of professional care?
Cadena did not arrive at Booth as a first-time builder. She founded International Events of the Year in 2010 and grew the Israeli production business for five years before selling it. She then cofounded Together Consulting, a six-person business that helped open hotel spas and franchises, and sold that company too. After moving to the United States, she worked in major-gift fundraising at AIPAC. The work sharpened a founder's essential craft: asking people to back a future that exists, for now, mostly in words.
The dog enters the business plan
In 2020, Cadena's husband, Alejandro, gave her a French bulldog named Shor for her birthday. She had grown up around pugs, so the dog itself was no novelty. The confusion surrounding what owners should do at home was. Appointments felt compressed; the hours between them felt underexplained. A routine frustration began behaving like a company idea.
At Booth, Cadena met Ashley Brooks. The two shared an interest in reshaping pet parenthood and, within weeks, chose to become cofounders. Cadena has since described the search for a cofounder in unusually personal terms: find someone who feels safe, shares your values and brings a different skill set. Brooks became CTO. They debated instead of echoing each other, which is less peaceful and far more useful.
Their early Vetted combined a membership, curated products, reminders, practical content and access to professional guidance. In the 2021 Edward L. Kaplan New Venture Challenge, it won third place and the competition's first People's Choice Award. The team received $198,750. A beta followed, then a public launch. By a 2022 Booth interview, Cadena said the company had raised another $1.5 million.
You need a direction and you need a goal but you do not need a plan for everything.Maya Shaposhnik Cadena
A company learns to shed its skin
The first answer did not become the final answer. Vetted moved into physical spaces, opening small wellness clinics inside pet resorts through a partnership with Destination Pet. Cadena described them as a first line of defense, a calmer and more convenient stop for routine needs. By late 2024, the company reported nine employees, 23 investors and $5 million raised.
Then the clinics closed. In a 2025 podcast conversation, Cadena spoke plainly about building the locations and shutting all of them down. Physical expansion demanded capital on a scale she did not believe the concept could justify. So Vetted moved back toward a fully digital model. The furniture disappeared; the question survived.
There is an unglamorous kind of courage in reversing a decision that once sounded persuasive in a boardroom. Cadena's account of pivoting includes the difficult human mechanics: a board built for the old model may lack the knowledge the new one needs. Relationships can remain meaningful while roles become obsolete. She has described those conversations as harder than investor discussions. Gratitude does not stop the clock, and a startup has very little clock to spare.
Her rule is motion with measurement. Jump, observe, adjust. She rejects the fantasy that a founder needs a plan for every contingency, since exhaustive planning can become an ornate disguise for standing still. Direction and a goal are enough to begin. The route earns its detail through contact with reality.
The Duolingo-Strava puppy
Vetted's next leap began in person. Cadena met the founders of Dogiz, an Israeli-UK pet app, and wanted to partner with them. Dogiz had spent years learning how to turn daily pet activity into a game. In July 2025, Vetted announced that it had acquired the company's proprietary technology assets. The deal supplied what Cadena called a “tech leap” and brought the Dogiz founders onto Vetted's advisory board.
The rebuilt product asks owners to log familiar routines, complete challenges, maintain streaks and compare progress on leaderboards. Activity earns Care Coins, which can be redeemed through rewards. Cadena's elevator pitch is cheerfully biological: “Duolingo and Strava had a baby in pet care, and it's Vetted.” It is a useful description because it tells us both what the app does and how she thinks. Education supplies the substance. Friendly competition supplies the return visit.
The product insight travels well beyond pets. Knowing and doing are different businesses. Information lives in a tab; habits live in a loop. A reminder makes the action visible. A streak gives yesterday a vote. A leaderboard makes private consistency social. A reward turns the completed task into a small receipt. The mechanics may look like confetti, but they are load-bearing confetti.
Vetted's model is now free to users, with Cadena outlining revenue from advertising, business partnerships and, eventually, aggregated and anonymized behavioral insights. The company plans to establish itself in the United States, expand first into other English-speaking markets and later include cats. In 2025, Cadena said Vetted had 100,000 users and named her next marker: one million.
I don't know what I don't know.Maya Shaposhnik Cadena
The useful humility of the third venture
That sentence, which Cadena has used to describe her mindset, is more operational than philosophical. Unknowns are not empty spaces. They are places other people can help illuminate. Her career is crowded with communities built for that purpose: the Argov Fellowship at IDC Herzliya, AIPAC, Booth's Armed Forces Group, the Polsky Center, a founding partnership and an advisory board expanded through acquisition.
At Booth she served as a co-chair of the Armed Forces Group and spoke about the pleasure of belonging to a network whose members covered for one another. She has called community the condition that helps her feel at home. Even her personal pleasures tilt toward gathering: music, funny stories and Shabbat dinners hosted at home. The CEO who warns that nobody can function in a silo appears to have arranged her life accordingly.
Her biography contains one more charmingly incongruous credential. A 2020 MBA profile noted that she earned a junior Olympic bronze medal in taekwondo. It fits the pattern almost too neatly: preparation, balance, impact, recovery. Yet the more telling fact is that Cadena keeps returning to beginnerhood. Events, consulting, fundraising, business school, memberships, clinics, consumer software. Expertise accumulates; certainty gets no such pension.
Founders are often praised for conviction, a word that can quietly harden into attachment. Cadena's version appears more flexible. She remains attached to the problem and keeps making the proposed solution reapply for its job. Vetted has been a box, a membership, a clinic and an app. Each version left something behind for the next one: customer language, operating data, partnerships, scars.
That pattern also explains why the Dogiz deal mattered. Buying technology shortened the distance between an idea and a working experience, while bringing in people who had already watched users respond to similar mechanics. Cadena did not need to pretend Vetted had discovered gamification alone. She could recognize useful work, preserve it and give it a new market. Reinvention, in this telling, includes the good manners to borrow intelligently.
The current wager is that millions of small acts can become a product, a community and a business. Owners will return because progress is visible. Partners will participate because attention is consistent. Vetted will learn because the routine creates a stream of signals. It is an ambitious flywheel built from ordinary Tuesdays.
Cadena's story offers a modest correction to the mythology of the perfect founder. The useful founder is not the person who always knows. She is the person who can admit the map has expired, keep the team moving and remain recognizable to herself after the turn. The old dog in this story may be an industry, a business model or the founder's own favorite assumption. Cadena keeps bringing treats, drawing a new route and teaching it to sit.