Pet Industry News
The deals, launches, and strategic moves behind the brands and operators shaping the industry.
Escalade Buys ASL Solutions, Betting on Pet Hard Goods
Escalade, the public sporting goods company behind Goalrilla and STIGA, has acquired ASL Solutions, a founder-owned manufacturer of insulated dog and cat houses. The deal, terms undisclosed, hands Escalade a rotational molding capability it didn't have before and marks its first move into pet hard goods.
Spot & Tango Makes Its First Above-the-Line Push as DTC Fresh Food Math Shifts
Spot & Tango announced its largest marketing investment to date: $3.5M+ in TV and OOH, plus field marketing. The push moves the brand from performance to brand at $100M+ ARR and signals that DTC fresh pet food is entering category-conversion mode.
PetPax Is Raising $1M on a Delivery-Form Wedge in Pet Supplements
PetPax Co., winner of the 2026 Purina Pet Care Innovation Prize Grand Prize, is raising up to $1M in pre-seed capital and has secured $200K of it since the March 26 win. The company's SupplaMelts oral-film delivery platform is a bet that compliance, not formulation, is the unsolved problem in pet supplements.
DeepScan Raises $3.5M to Push Canine cfDNA Testing Into the Vet Mainstream
DeepScan Diagnostics raised $3.5 million led by existing investor Calm/Storm Ventures, with additional participation from European family offices and Business Finland. The capital will fund expansion of the company's CFD cfDNA biomarker test from its current 100-clinic installed base across the U.S., U.K., and Finland.
The Bird Bath Launches Terminal, Putting EBITDA Multiples and Practice Data on a SaaS Price Tag
The Bird Bath launched Terminal on April 21 — a subscription platform covering roughly 37,000 U.S. vet practices, 80+ corporate groups, and an analytics layer with EBITDA multiples and transaction activity. Pricing starts at $299 per month with CRM integrations coming, changing who can act on deal-grade practice data.
Halo Collar 5 Closes the GPS Accuracy Gap. The Channel Question Is Bigger Than the Tech.
Halo Collar's fifth-generation product uses Swift Navigation's Skylark precise-positioning service to claim autonomous-vehicle-grade GPS accuracy, neutralizing the historical objection to virtual dog fences. The real contest ahead is service, subscription retention, and liability — not hardware specs — against Invisible Fence's dealer network.
Luxturna's Breakthrough Prize Has a $3B Footnote for Animal-Health Biotech
Penn Medicine and Children's Hospital of Philadelphia won the 2026 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for Luxturna, the first FDA-approved gene therapy for an inherited disease. The therapy was validated in a colony of blind Briard dogs at Penn Vet. Roche paid $4.3B for Spark Therapeutics to acquire it, then later wrote down $3B. The footnote matters for the animal-health biotechs using the same playbook.