Pet parenting in India is harder than it should be.” Vineet Khanna, co-founder of pet support platform Supertails, leans back in his chair and gives two examples that illustrate the lack of an ecosystem and low awareness about pets and pet parenting that make it so difficult.
Two girls tele-consulted the Supertails vet, saying their newly acquired cat was making “a strange sound”. The call switched to video, but the cat, unaware of the attention, took some time before she made the mysterious sounds that had her minders worried. Turns out that the girls had misinterpreted the sound—the pet was purring, happy to have a new toy.
On another occasion, someone called to say that he had started giving his cat packaged food but it was looking unhappy. On further inquiry, he said he was giving the cat “two pills (of kibbles) in the morning and two pills in the evening”—on an average, a cat could be given half a cup of kibble twice a day. “The poor pet was starving,” says Khanna.
Started in May 2021 by Khanna, Varun Sadana and Aman Tekriwal, Supertails caters to over 700,000 pet parents, delivering food, healthcare, medicines and accessories. Besides, there are online consultations, five clinics (and 10 upcoming) in Bengaluru, and home services (also in Bengaluru). Backed by over 100 veterinarians, more than 350 employees, around 30,000 products and community-led storytelling (they send handwritten notes and customised pet tags to customers), the Bengaluru-headquartered Supertails is a roughly ₹500-crore brand.
Khanna says cats (or cat owners) are more loyal as customers than dogs. “The moment we have at least three data points of a pet, their retention with us increases by 50%,” he adds.
At the Taj Santacruz near Terminal One of the Mumbai airport, Khanna’s just arrived from Bengaluru. Dressed in a dark customised Supertails T-shirt, the 40-year-old nurses a bottle of water. As the company spokesperson, he is used to talking, so the numbers and stories flow freely. Khanna is methodical in his storytelling, a tribute to his focus, which also helps him excel in “aiming” sports, like carrom and snooker.
Khanna grew up in Kanpur, born into a family of academicians. His father was a professor at HBTI (now Harcourt Butler Technical University), teaching oils and paints technology. Keen to get out of Uttar Pradesh for higher studies, Khanna joined Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology in Nagpur, but understood within two years that an engineering career was not for him.
When his father died suddenly in his second year of college, Khanna remembered a conversation where he had suggested that Khanna should consider an MBA. “Because that life event happened,” Khanna says, “I kept thinking that maybe it was some unfinished conversation he was trying to have with me. That became my goal for the next two years.”
His father’s demise led to financial struggles, so Khanna had to work doubly hard to crack the common admission test, and joined the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) in Lucknow because it was closer home.
“This is where I understood now that I would need to be more than an ‘academics person’,” he says, like becoming a committee member of their business-cultural festival Manfest. “Over a three-day period, a lot of coordination, a lot of crisis handling… it’s like a big, fat wedding. I did that for two editions after which the fear of anything new went away.”
He also met Sadana, his future colleague in many ventures, on campus. After successfully clearing the Tata Administrative Services (TAS) in 2009, Khanna moved across companies and projects within the group for the next five years.
By 2014, as e-commerce started booming, Sadana, who was with Snapdeal, encouraged Khanna to join too. Supply chain was new for him; the Snapdeal office in Gurugram was so small, remembers Khanna, that his first interview was on the terrace of the building. But when Flipkart’s acquisition of Snapdeal fell through about three years later in 2017, leading to layoffs, he figured that he too could end up on that list.
When Vivek Gupta (the co-founder of meat supply company Licious along with Abhay Hanjura) encouraged him to join supply and operations at Licious, Khanna convinced them, over many hours in a Gurugram hotel, that supply chain was not a one-person-led job. “I said it (supply) should be given a different bandwidth focus. Then I said,” remembers Khanna, smiling, “I have a guy (for the job).”
On their way to the airport, the Licious founders interviewed Sadana from the cab, and he joined the company 20 days after Khanna did. One of the other employees was Tekriwal.
After three years of fast-paced work—which included some “insane ops” during the covid-19 pandemic to catch up with a demand that went through the roof overnight—all three independently realised that their time was up. “Incidentally, we put down our papers together. We would have, amongst the three of us, served the longest notice period of any profession—21 months,” he says grinning.
The three decided to build a category which is emotional, habit-driven (not a one-off purchase like real estate, for example), and—of course—with a good bottom line. Sadana, who has a 14-year-old cat Nifty, and Khanna agreed that while with the rise of disposable incomes and direct-to-consumer brands led to more consumption, people were marrying later by choice and having no or fewer children than a few generations ago.
“When you don’t have these two, family and children, you still need oxytocin. You still need companionship. Now, pets fit in there well,” says Khanna. “When people are lonelier, they’ll keep more pets.”
The only question that remained: is it going to be sustainable? “This not a transaction, it’s a responsibility. That’s when our research started to come in.”
In India, after the pandemic (2022-23), penetration of petcare was at 10% and 15% in urban markets. Supertails found that data from community management apps for apartments in Bengaluru showed high numbers of pet ownership. It suggested that almost half of the market was created in the last one year—from a $200 million market in 2017 to a $500-600 million market in 2021.
“The pet owner had become a pet parent, shifting into a pet sibling, because the younger Gen Z was adopting. They didn’t want to be called a pet parent,” says Khanna.
The founders believed that the pet eco-system—food, healthcare, etc.—should be integrated, and the biggest component of this network should be the vet. For about 35-40 million pets in India, there are less than 100,000 vets, most of whom work with livestock. “You get a pet home, whether from the streets or from a breeder, the mother is gone, which means there is no continuity of wisdom from generations. This wisdom comes only from the vet.”
Today, every two in five orders are for medicines—healthcare is 25% of their overall business. The company, which competes with platforms such as Heads Up for Tails and online pharmacies like Tata 1mg, has also added an inhouse brand, Henlo, for high-quality food—though only for dogs at the moment.
Funding was not complicated, with Fireside Ventures, RPSG Capital Ventures, Sauce VC and Saama Capital becoming some of the early investors. Nippon India Alternative Investments, Titan Capital Winners Fund and $30 million in a funding round led by Venturi Partners came later.
In the background, without immediately realising it, Supertails was building a database, not of the pet parent but of the pet itself. They had information about breed, age and past ailments—not just the pet parent’s buying history. They could tell when a vaccination was due or when an ageing Labrador could start having joint issues.
Their next “big frontier” would be to “hyper-personalise” user experience, utilizing all the data to make sure every user’s app shows what’s relevant to them. “Today, we have about 600,000 pet names, 500,000 pet birthdays… Nobody (else) has them,” claims Khanna.
“If I know the pet’s birthday, I know its age. I know when its toys should move from chewy to engagement toys because the pet has moved from six months to a year. When the user comes to the app, he should see what’s relevant to his pet.”
Khanna pauses for a bit when I ask him for some in-house data, before his number-loving passion kicks in. While dog owners form nearly 80% of their clientele, he says, half of the business comes from cat owners. Dogs still can eat home-cooked food while cats are mandatory carnivores—so for a vegetarian family, feeding a cat can become a fully outsourced operation.
“Mumbai is the most loyal market for our business—more cat owners because of smaller apartments. Cats are sticklers for habit—if their food is eggs, they want to have eggs every day unless you change it. Dogs,” says Khanna, who has a mixed breed Labrador named Satchmo after Louis Armstrong, “are vacuum cleaners.”
As Khanna prepares to leave for his next meeting in BKC, using the city’s newly opened Aqua Line underground rail service, he points to another data point: almost 70% of their employees have pets, a mandatory requirement especially for customer-facing roles.
Arun Janardhan (@iArunJ) is a Mumbai-based journalist who covers sports, business leaders and lifestyle.