Every brand in the pet industry has the same line on its homepage: dogs are family. Then those same brands sell you a leash identical to fifty others, point you to a hotel that may or may not let your dog in the lobby, and quietly assume you’ll figure out pet insurance after something has already gone wrong.
We’ve spent the last three years building DogPack and looking at the dog industry up close. There are five dog industry problems no one is in a hurry to fix. Most of them aren’t hard. They’re just unprofitable in their current form, so they don’t get fixed.
1. Cities still treat dogs like a nuisance
Walk into any city in North America with a dog and try to plan your day. You’ll find parks with off-leash hours that change by month, posted on a city PDF nobody can find. Patios that allow dogs at one café but not the one next door. Bylaws written before anyone owned a Labradoodle. A general assumption that if you have a dog with you, you’re the one who needs to plan around the city.
Dogs live in 71 million American households. They have effectively zero municipal infrastructure designed for them. Google Maps will route you to any restaurant in three seconds. It will not tell you which of those restaurants will let your dog through the door.
The reason it persists is unglamorous. Signage and rules are governed at the municipal level, and there’s no commercial incentive for the big map providers to fix it. So the work doesn’t get done.
2. Dogs need to move and to socialize, and the city makes both hard
Dogs are social animals. A daily run is biologically non-negotiable for most breeds, and so is time around other dogs. We know this. We also know that condo developments have shrinking relief areas, off-leash hours have gotten more restrictive in many cities, and remote work hasn’t translated into more exercise for dogs.
The result shows up everywhere. Pent-up dogs with nowhere to burn energy and no one to play with. Owners who feel guilty. An entire genre of “anxious dog” content on TikTok that didn’t really exist fifteen years ago. The two most basic things a dog needs, movement and other dogs, are the things the modern city makes hardest.
3. The product market is unreadable
Search “dog leash” on Amazon. You will see two hundred products that are functionally identical.
The DTC boom from 2018 to 2024 spawned hundreds of pet brands selling the same six products with different fonts and worse customer service. Returns are high, brand loyalty is low, and acquisition costs are catastrophic. Consumers can’t differentiate. Brands can’t stand out. Everyone is losing slowly.
This is what a broken market looks like. The pet industry will quietly admit it at a conference and then go back to selling its leash.
4. Traveling with a dog is a research project, not a trip
You search “pet-friendly hotel in Lisbon.” A hotel shows up. You book it. At check-in, the front desk informs you that pet-friendly means small dogs only, and yours is one pound over the limit. Or that the fee is $40 a night instead of $20. Or that pets aren’t allowed in common areas, which means you can’t eat in the hotel restaurant.
This happens because “pet-friendly” is a marketing checkbox, not a real category. Booking platforms haven’t enforced a standard. Hotels can claim the label without consequence. The person it costs is you, mid-vacation, with a confused dog and a partner who’s annoyed at you.
The booking is the easy part. The harder part is figuring out, once you’re in a new city, where you can actually take your dog. Most travelers solve this by simply not bringing the dog. The industry has lost the trip entirely, and nobody is treating it like a problem.
5. Almost nobody has pet insurance, and that’s not an accident
Fewer than 5% of dogs in the United States are insured. Around 90% of dogs are insured in Sweden. The UK sits at about 25 to 30%.
The gap isn’t because Americans love their dogs less. The gap is structural. The North American pet insurance industry has spent decades selling reactively, writing policies that read like legal contracts, and mostly catching owners after their dog has already developed the pre-existing condition that disqualifies the claim.
Veterinary costs in the US rose nearly 8% in each of the last two years, well above general inflation. Five-figure vet bills are no longer rare for advanced procedures and emergency surgeries. The window to buy useful coverage is narrow, and the industry has done almost nothing to widen it.
What we’re doing about it
This is the part of the post where most companies pivot into a sales pitch. We’ll keep it short.
DogPack is built around the five problems above.
For cities: a map with over 100,000 dog-friendly businesses and more than 200,000 dog-friendly parks, trails, and beaches across 20+ countries. Searchable, current, and owned by the dog owners who use it.
For exercise and socialization: a map of parks, trails, beaches, and off-leash spaces where dogs can run and meet other dogs. Dogs need movement and they need each other. The map makes both easy to find, not just somewhere new to walk.
For products: a marketplace where AI helps owners find products that fit their specific dog, not the generic median.
For travel: Booking.com is now integrated throughout DogPack. The map shows you where your dog can actually go once you arrive.
For insurance: we partnered with Healthy Paws, a Chubb company, to offer US dog owners the best coverage at the best rates. More than 95% of US dogs have no coverage. That’s not a marketing problem. It’s a design problem.
We closed our Series A in 2024 at $8.6 million. Series B opens later this year.
If someone has a dog in their life, they should have DogPack in their life. That’s still the line. The rest of this post is why we mean it.
