Spanish pet health platform closes $5 million fund
Barkibu wants to boost its artificial intelligence capabilities and expand the portfolio of services.
Barkibu, which offers pet insurance services in Spain and Germany, will use the $5 million (€4.6M) capital injection to continue innovating in the pet health insurance space.
“Our mission is to help pet parents take care of their furry family members, and this funding will allow us to continue to improve and expand our offerings,” says Barkibu’s Co-CEO and Co-Founder Álvaro Gutierrez.
One of the lead investors is Kfund, a venture capital firm that operates in Southern Europe and Latin America.
Barkibu insures over 22,000 pets, two-thirds of which are in Spain and the rest in Germany. The company has raised around $11 million (€10.1M) since its establishment in 2014.
The importance of data
Aligning with the idea of artificial intelligence (AI) technology to improve health care, Co-Founder Pablo Pazos mentions the recent launch of an AI-enabled tool by Google Cloud to help health insurance experts become more efficient in the claiming process.
Barkibu uses pet health data to improve its insurance claim process by converting the thousands of “unstructured cat and dog health data” into structured one.
“The health needs of dogs and cats are still far from being fully covered. But we believe that Barkibu’s efforts in generating structured pet health data will contribute to the significant progress we will no doubt see in the coming years in animal health,” Pazos tells GlobalPETS.
The Spanish firm has created an app that helps pet parents have control over their cat or dog’s healthcare. It also features a calendar that keeps track of key dates, such as vaccinations.
