The co-founder Power of Pets (Pop), a Queenstown pet health and wellness company backed by Callaghan Innovation, said the pandemic was tough for everyone.
“But for me it was very tough.
“It was getting a dog that really helped me get through it,” he said.
The company had developed a sachet of supplements for dogs which it would use to further aggregate data on canine health in the United States, Mr Tsui said.
The “Pop-Topper” contained personalised nutraceuticals that could be mixed daily with wet and dry canine food, the end result being to increase your pet’s lifespan by targeting their inflammatory biomarkers, he said.
This included New Zealand green-lipped muscles and kiwifruit, the Finnish bilberry, which was “basically blueberries on steroids”, along with beef bone broth from grass-fed cows and curcumin.
The product had already soft-launched in the US market and a public launch would take place at the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas, in March next year.
After approaching Associate Prof David Thomas of Massey University, Mr Tsui said he developed his own AI model to reverse engineer the raw data from thousands of academic papers on endemic ingredients and their impact on dogs, which was mined to develop a formula.
Further studies had whittled down the list of ingredients, and the next step would be to collate the “massive amounts” of data provided by dog owners as they tracked their pets’ health and aimed to improve it over time.
This would be done using an app it was developing, funded by Callaghan Innovation through its Deep Tech Incubator programme, which would aggregate veterinary blood tests, at home DNA tests, collar-mounted health trackers and the results of owner surveys.
Testing was under way to collect data from a couple of hundred users in the US at present, Mr Tsui said.
The product began as “pun intended … a pet project”.
Pop was focused at present on the topper, but had the potential to cross-sell other tailored products and services with the data it was collecting.
The topper targeted five areas of dog health: heart, digestion, cognition, joint and skin, he said.
Other products contained a single ingredient that targeted a specific issue, and owners would need to feed their dogs a lot of supplements to cover all the bases, Mr Tsui said.
“Whereas we put everything in one stick.
“We’ve done it from a scientific approach, working with obviously New Zealand’s leading research institutions.”
The product had been tested on a 40-dog colony at Massey University, he said.
Dogs liked the product, and the company had received a total of $US1million in funding between Callaghan Innovation, Sprout Agritech’s Accelerator fund and a private family in Hong Kong.
Pop’s present focus was to expand its data platform by leveraging the topper, which was being sold commercially in the US, but not in New Zealand.
The AI model for collecting data for dogs was still very narrow, he said.
“But the more we build, we can leverage the … infrastructure and build out to cats as well.”
