The Leap Venture Studio is back with a fifth cohort of six innovative, early stage startups disrupting the pet care industry. In February 2022, six pet care startups joined the accelerator program for a 12-week immersive experience. Throughout the program, the founding teams worked in tandem with a curated team of strategists and designers from R/GA Ventures, and received mentorship from Mars Petcare and Michelson Found Animals on building impactful and scalable businesses. At the end of yet another successful program, we are excited to feature each of these amazing startups in a special blog series.

Hound (Denver, CO): Hound is making the employee journey awesome with their veterinary employee experience platform.

Andrew Luna, Founder:

What motivated you to build an impactful startup in the pet care space?

Andrew: I’ve been in the veterinary industry for over a decade. My best friends, family members, and closest colleagues all work in this profession. I believe the people of pet care deserve a better, brighter future. I am hoping to bring that to them through our technology.

What are the greatest challenges you’ve faced as a startup founder, and how have you overcome them?

Andrew: Being a first time founder comes with plenty of challenges, but we are fortunate to have a rich community excited to help us. Being a Hispanic, first-time founder raising a pre-seed between the coasts for a niche product is hard. To overcome this, we’ve leaned on the veterinary community and oversubscribed our pre-seed. It’s also hard taking a new product to market, but again we leaned on our rich community and over 1,000 practices started using Hound in our first 6 months. We are building technology to support the people of vet med, and the people of vet med have funded and evangelised us to make it happen — together.

What is your biggest take away from the Leap Venture Studio?

Andrew: Leap has reinforced our passion for community. The people we’ve grown with here have been fantastic. When you are around other entrepreneurs building awesome things, it creates an infectious synergy and pushes you further. We are so grateful for the relationships we’ve built over the past several months with R/GA, Michelson Found Animals, Mars Petcare, and the other companies innovating in this space.

How has your startup made a difference for pets?

Andrew: We are here to care for the people of pet care. When they aren’t healthy themselves, we can’t expect them to care for our pets. By supporting the care providers, they in turn provide better care for our pets.

What advice would you give to fellow pet care founders who are just starting their journey?

Andrew: Connect with other founders as frequently as you can. Learn as much as you can. Build as much community as possible. None of us can do it alone. Have fun building awesome things with awesome people.

Tell us about your pet(s)!

Andrew: I have two pups, Maggie and Mudpie. Maggie is a 5-pound sassy Chihuahua Papillon and probably the cutest thing you’ll ever see. Mudpie is a dorky street dog from South Africa who I adopted and brought home with me after living abroad. They help keep me sane.

What is the unique selling proposition (USP) of your company?

Andrew: Hound is providing more and better care for veterinary teams so they can do the same for our pets. Hound is the best United States veterinary job board. We’re here to help veterinary professionals find jobs.

Check out Hound’s pitch at the Leap Venture Studio Cohort 5 Demo Day that was held on April 28, 2022. If you are interested in connecting with their team, email us at leapventurestudio@gmail.com.