Metamorphosis Partners acquires Pawprint app (pet apps)

Metamorphosis Partners, a pet investment group, has acquired Pawprint, a popular pet health app that stores pet medical records.

Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Metamorphosis Partners is led by Brock Weatherup, a pet industry veteran who was previously with Petco following the acquisition of his startup PetCoach. He also founded Pet360, a pet-focused media company that was acquired by PetSmart. Current Metamorphosis companies include Barkly Pets (dog walking platform), The Anxious Pet (pet anxiety products), Great Pet Care (pet health content) and Muttropolis (e-commerce.)

Emily Dong, the founder of Pawprint, has already launched her next pet company – SnoutID, an app for vets that facilitates curbside check-ins and patient intake.  
 

More funding for Latin American pet startups
(e-commerce, startups)

The cash keeps flowing to LatAm pet companies. 

LAIKA, a Bogota, Colombia-based e-commerce platform for pet products and services, announced that it had closed a $5 million seed round. The funds will allow the company to expand its services into Mexico. Investors include some of the founders of Twitch and Tinder.

Zee.Dog, a Brazilian pet product brand, announced an investment of $18.8 million from private equity firm TreepCorp Investimentos. The funds will be used to launch the company’s pet goods delivery service (Zee.Now) in the US, to create a pet food division and to build a flagship retail store in São Paulo. 

These investments come on the heels of Petlove, a Brazilian-based online pet retailer, landing $23 million from L Catterton in June and $48 million from SoftBank in April. 
 

Nimble acquires Waggle Ventures
(pet gadgets, social media)

Nimble, a California-based tech company that sells a pet temperature monitoring device, announced that it has acquired Waggle Ventures, a social platform for pet owners. 

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Nimble, originally known as RV Pet Safety, markets a device that helps prevent dogs from overheating in RVs and other vehicles.

Waggle Ventures runs a YouTube channel with 766,000 subscribers, a Facebook group with 1.7 million followers and an Instagram account with 154,000 followers. The content is heavy on cute pet videos and animal memes. The company claims that it has 25 million monthly users that clock over 200 million minutes of monthly video views.  

COVID-19 wreaking havoc on Wag & Rover (pet services)

While some segments of the pet industry have experienced growth during the pandemic (ecommerce, veterinary telemedicine, direct to consumer pet food delivery and pet adoptions), this has not been the case with most pet services companies.

Specifically, the two dog walking powerhouses, Wag & Rover.

In recent interviews, the companies have detailed some of their woes:

• Rover laid off 41% if its workforce in March, leaving 275 employees on its payroll
• Rover received $5 – 10 million in PPP loans to help get through the pandemic
• Wag reported demand for its dog walking service was down 70% from the coronavirus
• In response to this lack of demand, Wag has started offering telehealth, pet food delivery and pet transportation services

The shelter-in-place orders from March and the subsequent trend toward working from home reduced many pet owners’ need to hire a dog walker. Hopefully, this drop in demand is temporary and Wag and Rover can hold on until things return back to normal.
 

Other News

• People are paying up to $10,000 for remdesivir for cats via black market Facebook groups
• Wired magazine lists the best veterinary telemedicine sevices
• Petscreening.com, a venture-backed startup that allows property managers to outsource residents’ pet issues, landed a deal that will add 12,233 apartments to its roster.  
• Pawfect, a startup in Pune, aims to disrupt the $350 milliion Indian pet market