A Coruña, Spain, March 18th, 2021 – Pet health startup Barkibu today announces a $5.6M bridge round to further its mission to empower pet parents to identify and solve pets’ health problems from the comfort of their own homes, with personalized healthcare that is better, easier and cheaper than what’s currently available today.
Barkibu combines a 24/7 AI-powered veterinary assistant which asks users simple questions about their pet’s health and symptoms, analyzes the answers against thousands of similar cases and provides advice around treatment and care, remote access to licensed veterinarians, and fully comprehensive coverage through pet insurance and prevention plans.
The round was led by Miami-based TheVentureCity, MundiVentures, CDTI Innvierte, and Barkibu’s co-founders, with participation from Leap Venture Studio, which is composed of Kinship and the Michelson Found Animals Foundation, with support from R/GA Ventures.
In its quest to disrupt the $100B pet health market through its holistic health platform, Barkibu has built an extensive AI-learning model, based on a library of 800,000+ answered consultations, to provide the first truly personalized view of pets’ health. It does so by aggregating data on pets’ health based on consultations made by pet parents on its mobile app, as well as on insurance claims from veterinary clinics.
Barkibu’s co-founder Pablo Pazos summarizes the value of this holistic approach, saying “our AI-driven telehealth reduces the operational costs of insurance and provides proprietary data to optimize insurance pricing and marketing. At the same time, we use the data from insurance claims to validate and train our AI.”
The funding will allow Barkibu to accelerate the expansion of its AI veterinary platform, broaden the list of symptoms it can interpret via its AIVet function (available globally) and increase its base of pet health insurance customers beyond Spain into new European markets.
“With so many people choosing to get a pet during lockdown, pet healthtech is on the rise,” says Laura Gonzalez-Estefani, founder and CEO of TheVentureCity, which participated in the latest funding round. “Because pet owners don’t see the expenses as optional, the industry is considered to be recession proof, and it will thrive despite the current economic dip we are witnessing.”
Pet health tech has soared during the pandemic, with people buying animals in record numbers during the lockdowns. As pet parents increasingly adopt digital solutions, the pet tech market alone is expected to skyrocket from $4.5B in 2018, to $20B by 2025, and is attracting investments from both venture capital and strategic players.
“In the current low touch environment, Barkibu brings peace of mind to every pet owner from the comfort of their home.” says Rajeev Singh-Molares, Founder and Managing Partner of Mundi Ventures.
About Barkibu
Barkibu is a Spanish startup on the mission to bring pet parents a personalized new type of healthcare that is better, easier and cheaper than what’s currently available today. Through a combination of an AI powered vet assistant, a telehealth platform and a suite of subscription plans, Barkibu offers immediate assistance, access to the best medical experience and financial peace of mind.
Barkibu has already partnered with some of the main global players in pet health and insurance, such as Mars Petcare and Munich Re.