Connected Home Might Be the Next Big Thing But Connected Pet Is Big Right Now

People seem less interested in refrigerators that text them to buy milk than seeing their pets are safe and happy while they're at work.

Just over a month ago, the largest M&A deal in ecommerce history took place. To the surprise of many, it was a pet ecommerce company, Chewy.com, which was acquired by Petsmart for a cool $3.35B, which is nearly $50M more than Walmart paid for Jet.com. Shortly before the Chewy.com deal, Rover.com acquired DogVacay in an all-stock deal -- and not long before that, Whistle, a company making dog GPS and activity trackers was acquired by leading CPG Mars for $117M.

The pet industry, which until recently was largely ignored, is suddenly heating up.

Fewer kids but more pets.

Millennials are putting off marriage and children but they’re increasingly active pet parents. Sixtyfive percent of US households have at least one pet, up from 56 percent in 2012, which means the market is immense but also growing very fast. Over $100B was spent globally on pets last yet but the bulk of it -- $67 billion -- was spent in the US. As of 2017, 95 percent of US pet owners consider pets to be family members, and refer to themselves as pet parents. This is a significant increase from 63% just five years ago. Read more

Yaroslav Azhnyuk - Entrepreneur - 17 June 2017