Lumus Investment Collective brought together 4 female angel investors to back Zenoo, a balanced raw pet food startup based in Vilnius, Lithuania.
The idea of Zenoo was born when two dogs of the (future) founders Agota and Mindaugas were diagnosed with an incurable disease and according to their vets, their life expectancy was no more than a few weeks. Agota and Mindaugas, desperately searching for a solution that they didn’t know existed, decided to switch from kibble food to the raw diet. To their surprise, they discovered that one in two dogs globally suffer from cancer and learned about the fundamental problem of conventional pet food - excess sugar. Agota has decided to cook their own raw food for her dogs and slowly realised that there are people out there with the same problem she has. This is how the idea of Zenoo was born.
After a few hours we spent with the founders, we were very impressed with their passion for the problem they’re solving as well as their domain expertise. Agota is a certified pet nutritionist, and Mindaugas is a serial entrepreneur and marketer. We are excited about this investment opportunity not only because they formed a great team with a strong product vision, but also because of the opportunity the market holds.
The European pet food market is rapidly growing. Around a quarter of European households own at least one dog. The size of the pet products and services market nearly doubled from 2010 to 2019. Around a quarter of households own at least one dog (65 million in Europe) and there is a growing number of pet owners, who like Agota, are concerned about the quality of their pet food.
Zenoo is solving a common problem of many dog owners - the inconvenience of preparing truly healthy dog food at home. Zenoo is a pet wellness D2C brand delivering healthy raw dog food and content subscription service in Lithuania and very soon across the EU. Zenoo is building a healthy alternative for pet owners that don’t want to feed their dogs with commercial kibble food. On top of it, Zenoo is building a digital platform to help pet owners to take care of and train their pets. Zenoo’s user-centric approach can be spotted in their exceptional customer service as well as in the level of personalisation they offer to their customers. Their customer portal creates automated recommendations about feeding, supplements, training, activity levels and wellness data.
This investment will help them to expand to the new market (Netherlands), bring a chief marketing officer on board as well as ensure the continuation of the product development.
Also, a huge thank you to our legal partner Ferro Legal for doing an excellent job with helping us with execution of this investment.
Oh, and the best news is the results! One of the dogs, Ferdinand, lived for 4 more years and Elli is still with the founders!