Guilherme Coelho | Co-Founder & CEO, Maven
Most owners catch a health problem only once it is visible, and by then it is usually late. Maven built its wearable around vitals instead of GPS, hired veterinarians before it shipped anything, and sells to owners rather than clinics. Guilherme Coelho on continuous monitoring, a study that set feeding portions by activity data, and why the consumer is the one who now brings the vet the data.
For most pet owners, realizing something is wrong often starts with a visible change: a dog stops eating, struggles to get up, or simply isn’t acting like themselves. For Maven co-founder and CEO Guilherme Coelho, that moment came when his dog Tommy suddenly couldn’t stand on his own. By the time he noticed, Tommy was already dealing with severe joint problems. The experience left him with a simple question: what if technology could catch the changes we can’t see?
That answer became Maven, a pet wearable built around health rather than GPS. Today, the company uses sensors and AI to continuously monitor activity, sleep, respiratory rate, heart rate, drinking, itching, and other behavioral signals, learning each animal’s individual baseline and turning millions of data points into information owners can actually use.
We spoke with Guilherme about building Maven, how AI is changing what pet wearables can do, the company’s research into activity-based personalized nutrition, its relationship with veterinarians, and why he believes continuous health monitoring could eventually become a normal part of pet ownership.
The idea for Maven really started with your own dog, Tommy, after a serious health issue seemed to appear almost overnight. What happened, and when did you realize pet wearables could become a meaningful health tool?
I was already in pet tech before Maven.
I understood wearables, what sensors could do, what was possible with data, and more importantly, what the modern pet parents were looking for. But like everyone else in the space, we were obsessed with GPS. Where’s my dog? Is he lost? That’s what drove the whole category.
Then Tommy happened. I only noticed something was wrong the day Tommy was barking at me because he was no longer able to stand up by himself. And of course, when I took him to the vet, Tommy was already facing severe joint problems.
And that’s the thing about pets: most of the time, when we just realize something is wrong, it’s already too late.
That’s when it hit me: I spend enormous amounts of time with Tommy. I know him better than almost anyone. Yet I missed it.
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