Vancouver firm sniffs out big returns in pet care, unleashing $10 million fund for startups

Alex Chieng, co-founder & CEO of Pawsible Ventures, joins BNN Bloomberg to discuss opportunities in the pet care sector and building pet health infrastructure.

Wellness products for pets are the new hot market according to a Vancouver based venture capital looking to cash in.

Pawsible Ventures launched a $10 million fund to invest in early-stage startups developing products for pets.

“Pet spending is growing year after year, and it really shows how pets are now becoming part of the family,” the company’s co-founder and CEO, Alex Chieng, told BNN Bloomberg in an interview.

“It’s just a whole new concept of the humanization of pets and they want better care, they want better nutrition, and they want better access to services.”

About 77 per cent of households in Canada owned at least one type of pet in 2024 according to a recent pet report published by Statista.

Chieng said Pawsible Ventures will invest in startups building a pet space across AI diagnostics and wellness. The company’s incubator program also aims to walk startups through a 12 week program where they help entrepreneurs take an idea from concept to marketing.

Rising costs, rising opportunity

Canadians spend over one billion dollars in veterinary costs per year, according to a 2024 study by Statistics Canada.

The amount Canadians spent on pets and pet food jumped from $5.7 billion in 2019 to $7.4 billion in 2022, according to a Statistics Canada report.

Canadians also spent over $9.3 billion on veterinarian costs between 2022 to 2023, which more than doubled from nearly $4 billion in 2019, according to a report from the Canadian Veterinary Medical Association.

This creates room for disruption in the industry according to Chieng’s company.

He highlights two key challenges: pet owners demanding premium services and veterinarians facing shortages.

He says Pawsible Ventures wants to invest in companies tackling these issues, particularly with pet insurance, which is either too expensive for pet owners or policies are too difficult to understand.

“I see opportunities there making policies extremely, easy to understand. And then also, secondly, making sure that the insurance rates are affordable for an average Canadian household,” said Chieng.

He says the percentage of pets that are insured is roughly four to five per cent.

“We definitely want to be able to support innovation in that space and get that percentage way higher,” said Chieng.

Chieng, who previously co-founded Betsy in 2019, one of Canada’s first telemedicine platforms for pets, said the fund aims to close the innovation gap between animal and human health.

“Oftentimes pet health lags a little bit behind human health,” said Chieng.

“So we really want to bring that up to par.”

AI in the game

Chieng says AI is being used to transcribe medical data, streamline appointment bookings and personalize nutrition plans.

“The best companies out there that are integrating AI in the animal health space happen on the back end where we as a pet owner, we don’t really necessarily notice it,” said Chieng.