pet-tech
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Adam Smithline Built a Smart Door. The Hard Part Was Learning When to Listen.
A ski-trip complaint became a smart pet door, then a long lesson in hardware, humility, and the expensive distance between a clean idea and a dependable product.
John Hussey Makes Two Kinds of Calls - Flags on Sunday, Lifelines All Week
An NFL referee walked into an airport with a startup on his mind. A decade later, his second rulebook has routed more than $100 million toward animal rescue - and put purpose-driven dog food on Walmart shelves.
Maya Cadena Keeps Teaching an Old Dog New Tricks
The Vetted founder has built, sold, studied, raised, opened, closed and started again. Her latest bet turns everyday pet care into a game - and makes the pivot itself part of the product story.
The Wedding Registry for Shelter Pets Is Run by an NFL Referee
John Hussey officiated Super Bowl XLV. His day job is a Seal Beach platform that has routed more than $100 million to 4,600 animal rescues - by selling them dog food instead of taking a cut of their donations.
The fence you can't see, on a frequency nobody else uses
A cat and a new sofa started it in 1990. Thirty-five years later DogWatch runs the last big hidden-fence brand that stayed independent - and the only one broadcasting on FM.
The Dog Whisperer and the IoT Guy Killed the Buried Wire
A GPS collar, a mandatory subscription, and a celebrity dog trainer walked into the $400M pet-safety market. Here is how Halo Collar turned a family tragedy into hardware people keep buying.
The Dog Door That Doesn't Cut a Hole in Your House
Two brothers-in-law on a ski trip did the math on dog boarding and decided the sliding door most homes already have could do the job of a pet door - if only it could open itself.
Whisker Turned the World's Worst Chore Into a Daily Health Signal
The company behind Litter-Robot is turning the least glamorous corner of pet ownership into a connected-care business - one bathroom visit, weigh-in and meal at a time.
Sebastian Gabor
Sebastian Gabor is the co-founder and CEO of Digitail, an AI-native, cloud-based practice management platform for veterinary clinics. A serial entrepreneur from Romania, he previously built the development studio ITGambit to nearly 100 engineers and co-founded the civic-tech non-profit Code4Romania. He started Digitail in 2018 with Ruxandra Pui after a vet handed him his dog's vaccination schedule on an illegible sticky note - a moment that led him to discover most animal hospitals still ran on software from the 1990s. Today Digitail serves more than 10,000 veterinarians and millions of pets, and in November 2025 raised a $23M Series B led by Five Elms Capital.
York Wu
York Wu is the founder and CEO of Petlibro, a fast-growing smart pet care company based in San Jose, California. A former Apple quality engineer who worked on the first iPhone and later founded the portable power brand Jackery, Wu launched Petlibro in 2019 to bring app-connected feeders, fountains, cameras and litter boxes to modern pet owners. Under his leadership Petlibro has become one of the world's best-selling pet tech brands, raising about $24 million through a Series B round and winning design honors including the German Design Award and iF Design Award.
Good Dog
Good Dog is a New York-based online marketplace that helps people find and bring home a healthy dog from a screened, responsible breeder, shelter, or rescue. Founded in 2017 by Josh Wais and Lauren McDevitt, the company built the first set of breed-by-breed, expert-backed standards for responsible breeding and health testing, then layered on secure on-platform payments, buyer protection, arranged transport, and a lifelong care team of veterinarians and behaviorists. It aims to bring transparency and accountability to a fragmented, opaque, and scam-prone process of getting a dog.
Josh Wais
Josh Wais is the co-founder and CEO of Good Dog, a New York-based marketplace that helps people find and get a dog from vetted breeders, shelters, and rescues. A Wharton graduate and early Jet.com operator, Wais built Good Dog with co-founder Lauren McDevitt after they hit a wall trying to find a puppy themselves and discovered how opaque and scam-prone the process was. The company applies expert-backed vetting standards to a fragmented, roughly $70-billion pet industry, and has raised over $18 million from investors including Felicis, BoxGroup, Slow Ventures, and the founders of Warby Parker and Harry's.
Petlibro
Petlibro is a design-led pet technology company that builds smart, app-connected devices for feeding, hydration, monitoring and litter care. Founded in 2019 by York Wu and operated by DesignLibro Inc. out of San Jose, California, the brand pairs minimalist industrial design with features like RFID multi-pet recognition, AI cameras and health-insight tracking. It has grown into North America's leading brand in smart pet feeding and watering, selling largely direct-to-consumer and through Amazon, with retail placement at PetSmart, backed by roughly $24 million in venture funding.
Garrett Smallwood
Garrett Smallwood is the CEO and Board Chair of Wag! Group Co., the publicly traded pet-care marketplace best known for on-demand dog walking. A three-time founder whose previous startups were acquired by The Home Depot, Expedia, and Wag! itself, he took over Wag in November 2019 and rebuilt it from a single-service walking app into a multi-product pet-care platform spanning walks, sitting, boarding, training, wellness and insurance. He also serves on the board of the San Francisco SPCA and is an Entrepreneur in Residence at seed-stage venture firm NFX.