U.S. spending on pets reached nearly $100 billion in 2020, up from $95.7 billion in 2019, according to the American Pet Products Association.
And according to Crunchbase News bad pet pun infused article Pets Became Purrfect Pals During Pandemic While Startup Funding Didn’t Lay Down, 55 pet startups raised $281 million in venture funding in 2020 (chart below).
Pet startups now even have their own venture accelerator programs.
Leap Venture Studios, for example, is a partnership between Michelson Found Animals and Kinship, a division of Mars Petcare.
Leap, which started in 2018, provides training, seed investments and other support to pet startups.
Regular readers know the pet humanization trend is driving the growth of the pet industry.
BTW, in case you were wondering, 63.4 million U.S. households own dogs. This is roughly half of all U.S. households (there are about 128 million U.S. households). Cats live at 42.7 million U.S. households (no one really owns a cat). Fish come in third, with about 14 million households owning them.
See our Pet Trends section for more pet humanization and the pet foods industry.
