Buffalo pet tech startup Peeva to scale quickly

Hamilton announced that his company signed a Global Marketplace Partnership Agreement with Covetrus, a global animal-health technology and services company – formed from the recent merger of Vets First Choice and Henry Schein Animal Health.

Peeva also has significant financial backing from two closed funding rounds, a working product, and paying customers. I had the opportunity to sit down with Hamilton to learn more about his company’s latest developments and what it means for pet owners.

According to Hamilton, the missing pet epidemic could be reduced to a much more manageable problem if scanning was the standard for all veterinarians and shelters. It turns out that the industry also lacks standardization, which means that a microchip will not likely be read if the pet is lost and taken to a shelter, or stolen and taken to another vet. This is something I found perplexing. Apparently, there are multiple microchip companies, multiple scanners, multiple frequencies in which they operate, multiple cataloging systems, and multiple registration databases. In other words, a scanner from microchip company A cannot read a microchip from microchip company B. Even if a chip can be read in certain instances, multiple registries need to be visited until a match is found. Then, when a registry is called, the calls are often placed on hold for long periods of time – veterinarians don’t have the time, staff, or resources to accommodate for the overall process. This has ultimately led to a lack of scanning for microchips altogether. As a result, pets that go missing are seldom recovered.