Startup The Farmers’ Dog Closes $8.1M Series A

The health food kick isn’t just for humans. Man’s best friends can stand to benefit from a good meal. A food startup looks to fill dog bowls with fresh ingredients just for them—and they just got some cash to do so.

The Farmer’s Dog just recently closed an $8.1 million Series A venture funding round led by Shasta Ventures with participation from existing investors Forerunner Ventures, Collaborative Fund, and SV Angel. To date, The Farmer’s Dog has raised some $10.1 million in two funding rounds.

The subscription-based pet food startup claims to have delivered over one million meals since its founding in 2015, said TechCrunch, which seems more than plausible in an industry that has been shown to be recession proof.

All told, the pet food industry saw global sales hit $70 billion in 2015 according to data from GfK market research—$24 billion of which came from the U.S. alone.

But The Farmer’s Dog has started to make a name for itself by offering products and ingredient qualities not typically found in run-of-the-mill pet food.

“We noticed that while all of the marketing revolved around healthy buzzwords like ‘real’ and ‘natural,’ the products inside the bag were generally the same highly processed mystery food left on the shelf for a year or two,” founders Brett Podolsky and Jonathan Regev told TechCrunch. “We thought if we could create a subscription for each dog—then why wouldn’t we? They eat the same thing everyday—we could make the food fresh, skip the middlemen, and deliver a product that’s truly healthy, affordable, and simply not available in traditional retail channels.”

The Farmer’s Dog’s products are reportedly sourced and produced using USDA and FDA standards—usually reserved for humans. With the latest round, The Farmer’s Dog will reportedly work to develop new products, hire additional customer support and tech employees, as well as to give a boost to the company’s production capacity.