Anurag Rathor didn’t leave one of India’s most prestigious banking roles to build the next pet app – he left because he lost his dog, Mac, and made a promise that no pet parent should ever have to feel as helpless as he did.
Rathor brings eighteen years of building and scaling global products to the table. He founded Zify Mobility in 2014 (a venture-backed startup that grew to 5 million+ riders across Europe and India), and went on to hold VP and Senior VP roles at the fintech unicorn BharatPe, and the third-largest bank in India, respectively.
With Pawbud Health, he’s setting his sights on a pet healthcare industry that remains largely reactive and fragmented. His solution is an AI health intelligence layer that connects pet parents, veterinarians, and insurers around a single source of truth for pet health data. And it’s built on top of a $50 billion insurance gap that the industry has long ignored. Pawbud is part of the MongoDB for Startups program, the NVIDIA Inception Program, and Founders Inc.
Pawbud is a MongoDB customer, and we sat down with Rathor to learn more about his journey. Read on below!
What inspired you to start your company?
I founded Pawbud so no pet parent ever has to say, 'I wish I had known sooner.' After tragically losing my dog, Mac, because his illness was detected too late, I realized the system is broken. After speaking with over 200 pet parents, I found 83% of them delayed vet visits, escalating minor issues into extremely costly surgeries. Meanwhile, vets are burning out, and pet insurers face soaring loss ratios due to limited health data visibility. Driven by a $50 billion insurance gap and rapid advancements in AI, now is the perfect time to build a pet healthcare that’s proactive.
What does your product do, and how does it work under the hood?
Pawbud is an AI-powered preventive health companion that detects 50+ health anomalies in cats & dogs using an image or a 15-sec video. Our multi-modal architecture combines a group of fine-tuned OS LLMs, and our in-house model trained on 1000s of real pet health data to structure legacy vet records and track 120+ biomarkers for anomalies over time. This data fly-wheel is created using our mobile app, hosted on a scalable cloud. MongoDB powers our backend, helping us manage complex longitudinal pet health records at scale.
What milestone or moment has been most meaningful for your startup so far?
The most meaningful moment for us at Pawbud came right after we emerged from stealth. In just one month, Pawbud attracted over 1,800 confirmed signups without any marketing spend. Even more important, a beta user, to test our accuracy, scanned his dog’s skin issue that had already been diagnosed by his vet earlier, and Pawbud’s health triage matched the vet’s diagnosis exactly. These early validations, both market pull and product accuracy, is a huge breakthrough for our team.
What’s one piece of advice you’d give to founders building startups today?
Make candor, radical truth and ethics your core operating principles. In the rush to scale, never overpromise or hide flaws. Trust is your only real moat. Be genuinely transparent about what your product can do. Ethical compromises compounds like technical debts, sooner or later, they do catch up.
Where do you do your best thinking?
Late night in the kitchen while making a cup of hot tea. Also, my brain works at 200% capacity after a long ride on my motorcycle.
Where can our community connect with you?
You can connect with the Anurag on LinkedIn and Twitter/X. To learn more about what Pawbud is creating, check out their website.
Thank you to Anurag for sharing his insight and information about his founder journey!
Thank you MongoDB and Anaiya for this wonderful news! The whole Pawbud Health team is super proud and happy.