Is the Pet Tech Market growing now?
In our Pet Tech market deck, you will find everything you need to understand the market
SUMMARY
Yes. The Pet Tech Market is growing now, and the clearest growth is coming from healthcare, diagnostics, veterinary software, insurance and technology embedded in recurring pet-care workflows.
The broader pet economy is still expanding, but inflation explains a meaningful part of that headline growth. Pet Tech looks stronger because several technology-heavy categories are growing materially faster than the roughly 4% pace of overall pet spending.
Veterinary diagnostics is one of the strongest proof points. IDEXX is growing recurring companion-animal diagnostics revenue at double-digit rates on a billion-dollar base, which makes this a scaled operating trend rather than a startup story.
The market is also shifting away from one-off hardware economics. The better businesses attach subscriptions, consumables, laboratory work, software or repeat clinical usage to an installed product, so revenue can keep compounding after the initial sale.
Consumer hardware works when the product solves a frequent problem. Tractive has built a large subscription base around GPS and health monitoring, while Whisker has sold millions of premium automatic litter boxes; generic connected feeders and cameras show much weaker momentum.
Veterinary software is becoming a larger part of clinic infrastructure. Newer platforms are pulling scheduling, records, billing, inventory, communications, payments and AI-assisted workflows into fewer systems, giving clinics a practical reason to switch.
AI is already useful in veterinary care, but mostly in ordinary workflow tasks rather than futuristic diagnosis. Documentation, intake, summaries and administrative automation are getting embedded into software veterinarians already use, which lowers the friction of adoption.
Pet insurance is growing, but the numbers need to be read carefully. Insured-pet counts are rising, yet written premiums are rising much faster, so pricing is currently contributing almost as much to the story as customer adoption.
Capital markets are split. Strategic buyers are spending meaningful amounts on scaled Pet Tech assets, while venture funding has become concentrated in a few healthcare, insurance and software rounds rather than spreading across a broad field of startups.
The market therefore looks healthy but uneven. The strongest version of Pet Tech today is less about adding an app to a pet accessory and more about becoming part of how pets are diagnosed, insured, monitored, treated and managed over time.
This market map, featured in our Pet Tech market deck, highlights top companies and startups in the pet tech market
Is Pet Tech actually growing now, or are pet bills just getting bigger?
Yes. The Pet Tech market is genuinely growing now, although rising pet prices explain part of the broader industry's headline growth.
For this analysis, we use Pet Tech fairly narrowly: connected pet devices, veterinary software, digital insurance, tele-veterinary care, diagnostics, AI tools and other technology built specifically around caring for pets. We exclude ordinary pet food, conventional retail and offline veterinary businesses unless technology is a central part of what they sell.
That distinction is important because the pet industry itself is still growing. According to the American Pet Products Association's latest State of the Industry report, U.S. pet spending reached $158 billion in 2025, up 3.7%, and is projected to reach $165 billion in 2026, roughly 4.4% higher. APPA estimates that about two percentage points of that projected growth will come from inflation. Price increases therefore explain almost half of the headline increase.
Pet ownership is also much steadier than it was during the pandemic. APPA counted 95 million U.S. households with a pet in 2025. Dog ownership increased, but there is no comparable wave of households suddenly becoming pet owners today.
The more useful comparison is between that roughly 4% pet-industry growth and the technology businesses sitting inside it. IDEXX's latest quarterly results showed recurring companion-animal diagnostics revenue growing 11%, including 10% organic growth. Its recurring veterinary software revenue is also growing at double-digit rates.
So Pet Tech is taking more of the pet-care wallet. Broad pet spending gives the market a solid base, while healthcare, software and recurring services are currently growing faster than that base.
Are smart pet collars actually taking off now?
Yes, but Tractive is doing most of the proving.
Tractive had more than 1.4 million active users when it acquired Whistle, Mars Petcare's connected wearable brand. That acquisition removed one of the better-known U.S. competitors and gave Tractive a larger American customer base.
The bigger validation came afterwards. In its latest quarterly results, Bending Spoons disclosed that it completed the acquisition of Tractive for an enterprise value of $759 million. Bending Spoons also said Tractive monetizes primarily through subscriptions.
That subscription model fits the product unusually well. GPS collars have a natural recurring service attached to the hardware because owners need cellular connectivity and continuous tracking. Tractive has gradually added activity, sleep, barking, resting heart rate, respiratory rate and other health information, giving owners more reasons to keep paying after buying the device.
The category is also becoming more concentrated. Whistle ended up inside Tractive instead of growing into another large independent platform. We can find plenty of smaller GPS collars and trackers, but very few have reached a seven-figure active user base.
Connected pet wearables work when the device provides continuous value. GPS, safety and useful health monitoring have proved much easier to monetize than adding connectivity to a pet accessory simply because the technology exists.
If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest Pet Tech market report.
As this chart shows, and as featured in our Pet Tech market deck, search interest in pet cameras has risen sharply
Are smart litter boxes really becoming mainstream?
Smart litter boxes are now a real consumer-tech category, although they are still premium products rather than mass-market appliances.
Whisker's current website says more than 2.4 million Litter-Robots have been sold. More than one million of those sales come from Litter-Robot 4 alone, a much newer generation of the product.
That second number is particularly useful. Whisker has been building automated litter boxes for more than two decades, so a large cumulative total by itself could hide slow annual sales. Crossing one million units with a recent generation shows that demand is still substantial.
The prices make the adoption harder to dismiss. Whisker's current lineup runs from roughly $599 for Litter-Robot EVO to $899 for Litter-Robot 5 Pro. Millions of customers are therefore buying a pet appliance that often costs more than a premium robot vacuum.
Whisker is also pushing beyond automated cleaning. Its newer products track weight, bathroom behavior and individual cats, while the app increasingly turns litter-box activity into health information. The machine is becoming useful between cleaning cycles instead of staying a one-purpose appliance.
We would still hesitate to call automatic litter boxes mass-market. Most cat owners do not own one. But within premium Pet Tech, the category has clearly moved past the novelty stage.
Is pet health technology the strongest part of Pet Tech today?
Yes. Pet health technology is currently the strongest part of Pet Tech because the growth is already visible at billion-dollar scale.
IDEXX gives us unusually clean evidence. During the first half of 2026, its companion-animal diagnostics recurring revenue reached about $1.90 billion, up 12.5% from the same period a year earlier and 10.7% organically.
Inside that figure, VetLab consumables grew 17.1%. Reference-laboratory diagnostics grew 11.3%. In the latest quarter alone, recurring companion-animal diagnostics increased 11%.
A $1.9 billion half-year revenue base makes this hard to wave away as startup noise.
The installed equipment also keeps expanding. IDEXX says its global premium instrument installed base grew 11%, while the installed base of its newer inVue Dx platform has already passed 9,000 instruments after more than 1,600 placements in the latest quarter.
There is an interesting split inside those results. IDEXX's diagnostics instrument revenue actually declined slightly during the first half, while the recurring revenue generated around those systems rose sharply. Clinics do not need to keep buying a new machine every quarter for the technology business to grow. More tests running through the installed equipment produce consumables, laboratory work and other repeat revenue.
That is why health technology looks much stronger than many consumer Pet Tech products right now. Once a diagnostic system becomes part of a clinic's normal workflow, usage can compound for years.
If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest Pet Tech market report.
This chart, included in our Pet Tech market deck, shows annual VC investment in pet tech startups
Are vet clinics really switching to new software now?
Yes. Veterinary clinics are switching to newer software now, and the adoption evidence is stronger than a handful of startup launches.
IDEXX generated almost $150 million in recurring veterinary software, services and diagnostic-imaging revenue during the first half of 2026, up 11.2%. The company attributes that increase partly to higher subscription volumes from its expanding SaaS installed base.
Smaller companies are moving faster from much smaller starting points. Digitail raised $23 million after more than doubling its customer base in twelve months. The company says its software now supports more than 10,000 veterinarians and three million pet parents.
Lupa provides another example. The veterinary software company raised $20 million only five months after its previous financing and reported 50x revenue growth between the two rounds. Petvisor is already operating at a different scale again, with its software suite supporting more than 13,000 veterinary hospitals.
The products are getting broader too. Scheduling, records, billing, inventory, customer communication, payments and clinical tools used to be spread across separate systems. Newer veterinary platforms increasingly want to own most of that workflow.
Clinics have a pretty practical reason to buy. Administration eats staff time, and replacing several disconnected tools with one system can have a direct financial payoff.
Is AI in veterinary care actually useful yet?
Yes. AI is already useful in veterinary care, especially for documentation, intake and clinic workflows.
Digitail now offers more than 15 AI workflows, including patient intake, medical-record summaries and clinical dictation. The company has started packaging these functions into different AI agents for medical, reception and practice-management work.
Instinct Science made an even more revealing move when it acquired ScribbleVet, an AI scribing company used by thousands of veterinarians. Instinct already provides software and clinical tools to more than 360,000 veterinary professionals, so the acquisition puts AI documentation directly inside a much larger existing workflow.
Lupa says its software can save veterinarians about an hour per day, although that figure comes from the company and should be read as a customer-use claim rather than an independent industry benchmark.
The broader pattern is convincing. Veterinary AI is increasingly embedded inside the software clinics already use, so a veterinarian does not have to change much behavior before getting value from it.
We are much less convinced by vague consumer products promising an "AI veterinarian." The commercial use cases that work today are more ordinary and more useful: writing notes, summarizing records, handling intake, organizing information and automating repetitive clinic work.
If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest Pet Tech market report.
This chart, included in our Pet Tech market deck, looks at Tractive’s strategy in pet tech
Is pet insurance still growing fast today?
Yes. Pet insurance is still growing fast today, although premium dollars are rising much faster than the number of insured pets.
NAPHIA's latest State of the Industry report counted 7.6 million insured pets across North America at the end of 2025, up 8.5% from 7.03 million one year earlier. Gross written premium reached about $6.2 billion, up 19.4%.
Put those two figures together and premium per insured pet increased by roughly 10% before accounting for differences in policy mix. Pet insurance has a genuine adoption story, but pricing is doing a lot of work as well.
There is still enormous room to add customers. Only 4.27% of U.S. pets are insured, including about 6% of dogs and 2.3% of cats.
Trupanion's latest quarter shows the same tension at company level. Total revenue increased 11%, subscription revenue increased 14% and subscription pets increased 5%. Yet total enrolled pets across the whole company declined 2%.
We would therefore call pet insurance a growing Pet Tech market, with one important caveat: revenue growth currently looks much stronger than pet-count growth.
| Pet insurance metric | Latest result | What we see |
|---|---|---|
| North American insured pets | 7.6M | +8.5% |
| North American written premium | $6.2B | +19.4% |
| U.S. insurance penetration | 4.27% | Huge remaining addressable base |
| Trupanion subscription pets | +5% | Core subscription book still adding pets |
| Trupanion subscription revenue | +14% | Revenue growing much faster than pet count |
Is online veterinary care actually sticking?
Yes. Online veterinary care is sticking, with the strongest model today sitting alongside physical veterinary care instead of trying to replace it.
Airvet is one of the clearest examples. Before raising another $11 million, the company reported more than 4x year-over-year growth in enterprise annual recurring revenue and said its client base had tripled.
What happened after that funding is more interesting than the round itself. Airvet expanded its telehealth service into the UK, announced partnerships with Healthy Paws, bswift and Rover, and more recently became a strategic Workday Wellness partner.
Airvet has increasingly become something employers, insurers and other pet businesses can bundle into a broader benefit instead of relying only on individual pet owners deciding to subscribe.
The use cases are also clearer now. Online veterinary care works well for triage, follow-ups, basic consultations, prescription questions, preventive care and situations where owners cannot easily reach a clinic. Physical examinations, imaging, procedures and emergency interventions still pull the customer back into an actual veterinary facility.
For now, hybrid care looks much more durable than the old idea that a telemedicine app would replace the local veterinarian.
This chart, included in our Pet Tech market deck, shows annual funding in pet tech startups
Is Chewy turning into a Pet Tech healthcare company?
Yes. Chewy is becoming a Pet Tech healthcare company now, while e-commerce still pays most of the bills.
Chewy's latest reported quarter shows how powerful its existing distribution already is. The company generated $3.36 billion in quarterly sales, up 7.7%, while active customers increased 3.6% to almost 21.5 million.
Autoship is even more useful for understanding the opportunity. Recurring Autoship customer sales grew 10.5% and represented 84.4% of Chewy's quarterly net sales.
Chewy can now use that customer relationship to sell more than food and supplies. It already operates pharmacy and healthcare products, insurance offerings, veterinary tools and Chewy Vet Care clinics.
The biggest move so far was its $400 million acquisition of Modern Animal. Modern Animal brought 29 clinics, 24/7 virtual care and more than $125 million in annualized run-rate revenue. The deal immediately expanded Chewy's veterinary footprint from 18 clinics to 47.
That combination is unusual. Chewy can acquire customers through retail, keep them ordering through Autoship, fill prescriptions, connect them with veterinarians and increasingly treat the pet inside its own clinic network.
A standalone Pet Tech startup normally has to pay to build every customer relationship from scratch. Chewy already has almost 21.5 million of them.
Are investors really betting on Pet Tech now?
Yes, but selectively. The current funding market is far thinner than the headline dollars suggest.
Our Pet Tech funding tracker shows a strong 2025 followed by a much narrower 2026 so far. Using a strict definition that excludes ordinary pet retail, food, offline-first clinics and non-tech animal-health businesses, we counted about $65 million across seven qualifying deals in 2024. That increased to roughly $167 million across 14 deals in 2025.
Between January and July 2026, qualifying companies raised about $91 million across only four deals. The comparable period in 2025 produced roughly $101 million across nine deals.
The dollar total therefore looks fairly resilient, while the number of companies getting funded has dropped sharply.
One financing explains most of that. Lassie's $75 million Series C represents about 82.5% of the qualifying Pet Tech capital we tracked during the first seven months of 2026. Remove Lassie and the year becomes extremely quiet.
Where investors put the money is also revealing. Pet-care applications covering insurance, healthcare, veterinary workflows, diagnostics, pharmacy and related services captured more than 95% of the qualifying capital in 2026 so far. The same group received roughly 81% in 2025.
Investors currently seem much happier funding software and healthcare businesses with recurring revenue than another standalone connected pet gadget.
| Period | Qualifying deals | Disclosed funding | What changed |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | 7 | ~$65M | Small but active market |
| 2025 | 14 | ~$167M | Both deal count and capital jumped |
| Jan-Jul 2025 | 9 | ~$101M | Funding spread across more companies |
| Jan-Jul 2026 | 4 | ~$91M | Similar dollars, far fewer rounds |
| 2026 excluding Lassie | 3 | ~$16M | Current funding is extremely concentrated |
If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest Pet Tech market report.
This chart, included in our Pet Tech market deck, compares the main business model options for pet GPS wearable companies
Are buyers acquiring Pet Tech companies more aggressively now?
Yes. Buyers are acquiring more pet-health and Pet Tech businesses now, with strategic acquirers much more active than they were a year ago.
The latest broad sector count we found comes from Capstone Partners. Its early-2026 Pet Sector update recorded 18 announced or completed deals compared with eight during the same period one year earlier. Nine of the 18 targets were in Vet & Health.
Strategic buyers accounted for 10 deals, up from only three in the comparable period. We treat those numbers as an early-year read rather than a full-year tally, but the jump is large enough to matter.
The technology deals fit the same pattern. Bending Spoons bought Tractive for $759 million, giving a software-focused acquirer a large subscription pet-tracking business. Chewy spent $400 million on Modern Animal to accelerate its veterinary healthcare platform. Instinct Science acquired ScribbleVet to put AI documentation directly into veterinary practice software.
Those buyers wanted three different things: a recurring consumer subscription, a physical-and-digital healthcare network, and an AI workflow product. All three sit close to an ongoing relationship with the pet owner or veterinarian.
M&A currently looks broader and healthier than venture funding. Startups are finding it harder to raise fresh equity, while established buyers are willing to spend meaningful amounts when a Pet Tech company has already built distribution, recurring revenue or an important place inside veterinary workflows.
What could slow the Pet Tech market down now?
Pet Tech could slow quickly if owners resist higher prices or if connected products fail to earn a recurring place in pet care.
Consumer pressure is already visible. APPA says 22% of U.S. pet owners spent less on their pets in 2025, and its latest research shows more owners looking for value. The association also expects inflation to account for nearly half of the broader pet industry's nominal growth in 2026.
Pet insurance faces a similar pressure. Trupanion's average monthly revenue per subscription pet has risen from $78.73 to $86.62 year over year, while its average pet acquisition cost increased from $272 to $307. Higher pricing helps revenue, but eventually customers have to decide whether the product is still worth paying for.
Expensive hardware has the same problem. A $600 to $900 automatic litter box can work when it removes a chore owners hate. A connected device with only marginally useful app features has a much harder sell.
Our funding data makes the difference unusually visible. Connected pet feeders and monitoring cameras produced no qualifying disclosed equity rounds in our 2024, 2025 or 2026 year-to-date dataset. Investors have continued funding connected products when health monitoring, safety or useful data are central to the product, but generic connectivity has attracted very little fresh capital.
The biggest threat to Pet Tech is probably not people suddenly spending nothing on pets. The weaker products are more likely to get squeezed first as customers become pickier about which subscriptions, devices and services actually improve pet care.
If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest Pet Tech market report.
This chart, featured in our Pet Tech market deck, illustrates revenue distribution by customer segment in the pet tech market
Is the Pet Tech Market growing now?
Yes. The Pet Tech Market is growing now, and the evidence is strong enough to call the market healthy, though clearly uneven.
We can see growth from several independent directions. Large veterinary technology companies are still posting double-digit recurring revenue gains. Clinics are adopting newer software and AI tools. Pet insurance continues to add covered animals. Connected-device leaders have reached millions of customers. Strategic acquisitions have picked up sharply in the latest sector-wide data.
The weak point is venture funding. Current funding dollars are being propped up by a very small number of large rounds, while the number of Pet Tech startups raising money has fallen. That keeps us from calling this a broad startup boom.
Consumer hardware is also split. GPS and health tracking have produced a scaled subscription company. Automated litter boxes have produced a multi-million-unit consumer brand. We find much weaker evidence for a general boom across feeders, cameras and ordinary connected accessories.
Most of the growth we can actually verify today is happening in pet health, veterinary software, insurance, diagnostics, AI-assisted workflows and products that solve a frequent problem for owners.
So the answer to the title is fairly direct: the Pet Tech Market is growing now, but the strongest part of the market is no longer "gadgets for pets." Technology is becoming part of how pets are diagnosed, insured, monitored and treated, and that side of Pet Tech is currently growing faster and more consistently than the broader pet economy.
| Pet Tech segment | Current read | Strength of evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Veterinary diagnostics | Growing fast | Very strong |
| Veterinary software | Growing fast | Very strong |
| Veterinary AI | Growing | Strong |
| Digital pet insurance | Growing fast | Strong |
| Tele-veterinary care | Growing | Strong |
| GPS and health wearables | Growing, concentrated | Strong |
| Automated pet-care hardware | Growing selectively | Strong for category leaders |
| Generic connected gadgets | Weak to mixed | Limited |
| Pet Tech venture funding | Selective | Mixed |
| Pet Tech M&A | Accelerating | Strong |
OUR METHODOLOGY
This analysis tests whether the Pet Tech Market is growing now by looking at the parts of the market where current behavior can actually be observed. We use a fairly narrow definition of Pet Tech: connected pet devices, veterinary diagnostics, veterinary software, AI tools, digital insurance, tele-veterinary care and other technology built specifically around caring for pets. Ordinary pet food, conventional retail and offline veterinary businesses are excluded unless technology is central to what they sell.
We treated this as a market-diagnosis problem rather than a market-sizing exercise. Pet Tech spans several businesses that do not move together, so we assessed consumer hardware, diagnostics, software, AI, insurance, tele-veterinary care, venture funding and M&A separately before forming the market-wide conclusion.
For each area, we prioritized recent operating evidence: revenue growth, recurring revenue, installed bases, active users, product sales, insured-pet counts, insurance penetration, funding rounds and acquisitions. We favored observed activity over long-range market forecasts because it gives a cleaner view of what customers, clinics, investors and strategic buyers are doing now.
The broader pet economy is used as a reference point rather than as proof that Pet Tech itself is growing. APPA's 2025 spending data and 2026 projection help separate technology-led growth from nominal industry growth driven partly by inflation.
No single company or dataset is used as a proxy for the whole market. IDEXX provides the clearest scaled evidence for veterinary diagnostics and software; Tractive and Whisker help test consumer hardware adoption; NAPHIA and Trupanion show what is happening in pet insurance; Airvet helps test tele-veterinary care; and recent transactions from Bending Spoons, Chewy and Instinct Science show where strategic buyers are willing to commit capital.
We also treated scale and business model differently. A fast growth rate from a small software company is useful, but it carries less weight than double-digit recurring growth on a billion-dollar base. Likewise, connected hardware looks more convincing when it supports a subscription, repeat clinical usage or another recurring revenue stream.
Our funding tracker uses a strict Pet Tech definition and excludes ordinary pet retail, food, offline-first clinics and non-tech animal-health companies. We compared both disclosed dollars and deal counts because one large financing can make a weak funding year look much stronger than it really is.
The final assessment comes from the breadth, scale, consistency and recency of the evidence across these dimensions. That is why we can call the Pet Tech Market growing overall while still describing generic connected gadgets and current venture funding as much weaker parts of the market.
Key sources used for this analysis include: https://americanpetproducts.org/2026-state-of-the-industry, https://americanpetproducts.org/news/u.s.-pet-industry-reaches-158-billion-in-2025-poised-for-continued-growth-in-2026, https://ir.idexx.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/414/idexx-laboratories-announces-second-quarter-results, https://ir.idexx.com/sec-filings/all-sec-filings/content/0000874716-26-000123/idxx-20260630.htm, https://tractive.com/blog/en/press/tractive-acquires-whistle, https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2004711/000200471126000011/bsp_ex99-1.htm, https://www.whisker.com/, https://digitail.com/blog/digitail-raises-23m-series-b-led-by-five-elms-capital/, https://instinct.vet/news/instinct-science-scribblevet-acquisition-2026/, https://naphia.org/industry-data/, https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1371285/000137128526000171/ex991q22026.htm, https://www.airvet.com/blog/airvet-workday-wellness-partner, https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1766502/000162828026042058/chwyq12026exhibit991.htm, https://investor.chewy.com/news-and-events/news/news-details/2026/Chewy-to-Acquire-Modern-Animal-Accelerating-Evolution-to-a-Fully-Integrated-Healthcare-Ecosystem/default.aspx, and https://www.capstonepartners.com/insights/article-pet-sector-ma-update/.
This chart, included in our Pet Tech market deck, shows how pet telehealth app technology has evolved over time
Related blog posts
- What is the real size of the Pet Tech market?
- What are the latest fundraising trends in the Pet Tech market?
