Mark Anderson
Furryfur is a pet-tech startup that focuses on dogs and aims to resolve mental health concerns in them. We are on a mission to make this world a happier place for dogs.
Tell us about yourself?
I hail from a small town in India, where I was born and raised, and lived till the age of 18. I further moved to Mumbai to study university, where I studied biotechnology.
After completion, I worked in business development, but soon realised my incline towards innovation and entrepreneurship. I moved further to Cranfield University, UK to study MSc in management and entrepreneurship.
During those 18 years at my hometown, I was very close to my family pets. We had several dogs and cats as our pets throughout those years. I always felt that I could understand what our dogs want to say, and we would just connect.
But as I moved further from home, I soon realised that it is not the case with most of the pet parents. Infact, a large chunk of pet parents struggle to understand the basic cues of their dogs, and this has lead to a significant problem related to mental wellness of dogs. While studying at Cranfield, I researched about this in further details, and thus Furryfur was born.
If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?
The best piece of advice would be to be resilient. It is one of the most important factors in the career journey of any entrepreneur.
What problem does your business solve?
Furryfur aims to resolve mental health issues in dogs. Most common among those being anxiety and depression.
What is the inspiration behind your business?
While taking strolls across the parks, I would see lots of dogs along with their parents. A good fraction of those would display signs of anxiety and I would wonder why aren’t the parents doing anything about it?
As I researched more about it, I understood that most of the people fail to understand these signs and consider it as their dog acting up for attention.
This made me feel very bad for the dogs, and I had to do something for it. Today, furryfur uses its AI technology to accurately detect mental wellbeing status of dogs, so as to identify any levels of mental issues, and thus provide pet parents with guides on how to keep their dog happy and resolve all these issues.
What is your magic sauce?
Our cutting edge AI accurately scans every dogs facial expressions to present mental health vitals of the dog. This helps us determine exactly the mental health status of the dog and thus curate personalised care plans.
Furryfur identifies and certifies pet-care businesses which are able to prove that their services improve mental wellbeing of dogs.
We perform these extensive checks manually along with the help from our AI. Our AI is also very crucial to quantify the effects of the personalised plan and determine the effect of it on the health of dog. We have so far observed over 65% reduction in anxiety of dogs with furryfur.
What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?
FurryFur is currently based in the UK, providing mental health analysis and personalised plans for dogs. As we embark on this journey, we plan to have significant technological development.
We are on a path to provide dogs with voice, so that dogs can talk to the owners in the language they understand. We should be able to come up with a beta version for this somewhere around mid 2023.
This will allow dog owners to understand their dogs much more efficiently, and thus would lead to overall improvement in dogs mental health. FurryFur’s vision is to become the name synonymous to dog’s mental health.
What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?
Furryfur began with a mission in mind, which is to make this world a happier place for dogs. We began with developing a platform to book dog walking and sitting services, where we would match dogs with the best walker to suit their mental needs.
As we were developing it, during our alpha testing, we noticed that there weren’t significant improvements in the mental wellness of dogs just during walking/sitting sessions.
This could have grown into a business, but it wouldn’t align with the company’s mission and hence we soon pivoted. We looked at dog trainers this time, and noticed that dog trainers and behaviourists seem to be more helpful for the dogs.
Partnering with some dog behaviourists, we developed detailed plans for dogs, which have a personalisation element to it based on mental wellness. Today, our personalised plans are able to reduce anxiety and depression levels upto 65%.
Today, the single most major challenge we are facing is customer awareness, as very few dog parents are aware of the fact that their dog maybe suffering. As we grow, people would understand the importance and hence will surely try to help their dog.
How do people get involved/buy into your vision?
We want various speciality pet stores to start collaborating with us, where they could sell products to the dogs, which would be personalised to best match their needs. They can get in touch through our website directly.
