Why We Invested in Dr Paws: Building Trust in India’s Fast-Growing Pet-Care Sector
Yash Gokhroo and Anoop Menon
Dec 10, 2025
India’s pet-care market is undergoing a significant transformation. Urban lifestyles, rising disposable incomes, and a shift towards nuclear households are reshaping how Indians think about pets. Increasingly, pets are not just animals—they are companions, emotional anchors, and for many couples, even children. A major demographic driving this shift is the rapidly expanding population of Double Income No Kids (DINK) households, which, according to Redseer, is growing at nearly 30% annually. As loneliness rises and family structures evolve, more Indians are adopting pets, humanising them, and seeking higher-quality healthcare and wellness services than ever before.
This behavioural shift has catalysed the rapid growth of the Indian pet-care industry. Redseer estimates the sector will reach $7 billion by 2028, growing almost 2x since FY20. Within this, healthcare, grooming, and nutrition are some of the largest spending categories, especially in metros. Several structural growth drivers are accelerating this shift:
Key Growth Drivers
- Rise of DINK households – more disposable income, growing desire for companionship.
- Pet humanisation – pets increasingly treated like children, driving demand for quality care.
- Urban nuclear families – seeking convenience, clean facilities, and organised service formats.
- Lifestyle and genetic health issues in pets – increasing need for reliable, sophisticated veterinary care.
- Greater awareness of preventive healthcare – shifting pet parents from reactive to proactive care.
- Increase in first-time pet parents – higher expectations around transparency, hygiene, and empathy.
Yet, despite the clear and rising demand, the veterinary care ecosystem is highly fragmented and inconsistent. More than 90% of the market is still unorganised, largely operating through small clinics that vary widely in service quality and experience. Pet parents consistently voice dissatisfaction across several dimensions:
What’s Broken in the Current Vet Landscape
- Transactional, inconsistent care with little emphasis on experience or empathy.
- Long wait times and unpredictable scheduling.
- Poor hygiene and outdated facilities, creating anxiety for pets and parents.
- Opaque pricing with minimal transparency.
- Limited diagnostic and surgical capability, requiring multiple visits across locations.
- Weak clinical standardization, leading to varying outcomes across clinics and vets.
This gap creates a clear opportunity for a modern, SOP-driven veterinary chain that matches the expectations of today’s pet parents – who want trust, quality, transparency, and an emotionally safe environment for their pets.
Dr Paws is building exactly this solution. Designed as a full-stack, tech-enabled chain, Dr Paws combines clinical excellence with hospitality-grade experience. Their clinics are warm, clean, and pet-friendly, intentionally designed to feel nothing like traditional hospitals. Importantly, they have embedded empathy into their training and culture – most staff are pet parents themselves, and every element of service delivery is crafted to be compassionate and non-transactional.
Beyond experience, Dr Paws offers a comprehensive, standardised, and technology-driven clinical model. Under the leadership of their Chief Veterinary Officer, they have developed rigorous protocols, weekly training, seamless EMRs, and consistent treatment standards across centres. Combined with tech-enabled operations, this produces a level of reliability and care continuity that the category has long lacked.
How Dr Paws Is Redefining Veterinary Care
- Full-stack model: Consultations, surgeries, imaging, diagnostics, grooming, retail, and pharmacy under one roof.
- Experience-first clinic design: Calm, clean, pet-friendly spaces with separate zones for cats and dogs.
- Empathy as an SOP: Staff training focused on communication, bedside manner, and compassionate care.
- Rigorous clinical protocols led by an experienced CVO with strong medical governance.
- Tech-enabled patient journey: EMRs, appointment systems, and seamless follow-ups for continuity.
- High consistency and transparency in diagnosis, treatment plans, and pricing.
Why Chiratae Saw This as The Winning Entry Wedge in the Pet Ecosystem
As we examined the broader pet-tech and pet-commerce landscape, a few patterns became clear. Several startups in pet products, pet commerce, and pet brands had received funding, but these categories tend to suffer from low trust, low loyalty, and weak entry moats. Switching costs are minimal, customer love is fleeting, and differentiation is thin.
- Trust in healthcare is the most defensible entry wedge in the pet category.
- Once trust is established through services, it becomes extremely difficult for customers to switch.
- Top-of-mind recall solidifies when a brand becomes the first call in moments of vulnerability.
- A services-led trust moat can unlock long-term expansion into products and ecosystem offerings.
This framework shaped our search for a team capable of building a high-trust, healthcare-first platform – a platform upon which services, products, community, and broader ecosystem plays could be built over time.
As trust deepens in a services-led business – especially in healthcare – it naturally enables expansion into adjacent product categories such as nutrition, consumables, supplements, and wellness. A strong service-led trust moat increases share of wallet and boosts lifetime value (LTV), positioning Dr Paws to become the preferred brand for both care and consumption. We are already seeing early signs of this, with pet parents increasingly turning to Dr Paws’ clinics for curated products and retail needs.
Why We Backed This Founding Team
When we first spoke to Udit and Rakesh, what stood out was not just their clarity of thought—but their lived understanding of the problem and their deep, personal connection to the solution they are building.
Udit brings an exceptional skill set at the intersection of customer experience, brand, design, and product thinking. His time at BCG and operating experience were evident in how he articulated clinic flow, parent experience, and the emotional nuances of pet care. He combines consumer empathy, structured thinking, and design instincts traits rarely found together in healthcare delivery.
Rakesh brings a complementary and equally powerful operational background. His experience running the Hyderabad P&L at Cult Fit – overseeing 100+ centers and large teams—gave him deep expertise in multi-centre operations, process standardization, real estate selection, and quality control. His execution-first approach, strong financial discipline, and ability to scale standardized service formats came through clearly in every conversation. Together, they combine consumer insight, operational sharpness, strategic thinking, and most importantly, genuine empathy as pet parents themselves. These interactions strengthened our conviction that they are the right founders for this category.
At Chiratae, we believe the pet-care market over the next decade will mirror the evolution of human healthcare 10–15 years ago: rapid formalization, strong brand-led consolidation, and the emergence of national chains built on trust and quality. We are convinced that Dr Paws is on track to become one of these category-defining companies. Their emphasis on empathy, clinical excellence, consistent quality, and customer love positions them uniquely to lead in a $7B+ market that is still waiting for a trusted national brand.
As India’s pet economy accelerates, the most valuable moats will be trust, consistency, and customer experience. Dr Paws is building precisely these moats—and doing so with discipline, compassion, and long-term thinking. We are excited to partner with them on this journey and to back a team that is setting new benchmarks for what pet healthcare can and should look like in India.