When 300 million senior citizens meet 100 million pets: Youwei cuts into the family care track, and aims to build the "home-based elderly care" model for the pet industry.
Against the backdrop of population aging and changing family structures, pets are gradually evolving from traditional companion animals into formal family members. Meanwhile, while the growth of pet ownership is slowing down, consumer demands centered on health management, medical services and refined care continue to rise.
Data from the National Bureau of Statistics shows that by the end of 2025, the number of people aged 60 and above in China reached 323 million, accounting for 23.0% of the total national population, and the number of people aged 65 and above hit 224 million, making up 15.9% of the population. On the other side, the number of dogs and cats in urban China reached 126 million in 2025, with the pet consumer market size hitting 3.126 trillion yuan, representing a year-on-year increase of 4.1%. As pet consumption extends from food and supplies to medical care, services and other sectors, the new demands generated by the overlapping of the aging population and pet aging are becoming a new service entry point for the industry.
Against this background, "YOVI PET", a pet life service brand under Linkalink (Wuhan) Co., Ltd., targets middle-aged and elderly pet-owning families. Starting from in-home pet care, it attempts to build a service system covering the whole life cycle of pets through services such as door-to-door services, post-medical care, medical visit assistance, senior pet care and end-of-life care. At present, YOVI PET has completed the development of the official website MVP test version and is in the angel round financing stage, planning to raise 5 million to 8 million RMB for product construction, market expansion and service system establishment.
Entering the home care service from the "gap" after pet medical treatment
For pet-owning families, a pet falling ill does not mean the whole process ends after they are taken to a veterinary hospital. After diagnosis, treatment, surgery or hospitalization, when pets return to the home environment, they may still require ongoing medication administration, cleaning, wound care, rehabilitation care, diet management and daily observation.
This segment still lacks standardized and professional service supply at present.
Some of the existing door-to-door pet feeding, dog walking and other services in the market are provided part-time by ordinary domestic workers or cleaners, whose core competence does not come from professional pet medical and nursing training. When pets enter old age, or have mobility problems, postoperative recovery needs, chronic diseases and other conditions, ordinary feeding and pet walking services can hardly cover more complex care demands.
What YOVI PET aims to solve is exactly this "home care gap".
In terms of service design, YOVI PET puts forward the "pet family doctor" model, but its positioning is not to replace veterinary hospitals for diagnosis and treatment, but to build a long-term home care entry point that connects pet-owning families, veterinary hospitals and professional service providers. Veterinary hospitals are responsible for diagnosis and treatment, while YOVI PET undertakes post-diagnosis home care and non-medical services, and provides services such as door-to-door medication assistance, daily cleaning, nursing assistance, rehabilitation companionship, medical visit accompaniment and pet transfer by professional staff.
For pets with limited mobility or advanced age, the value of door-to-door services is even more prominent. For example, if a pet is old, heavy, or lives in a residential building without an elevator, it may become a burden for the owner to take the pet to a pet store for grooming and bathing; after the pet returns home after surgery, if the owner lacks nursing experience, professional personnel are also needed to assist with daily care.
Therefore, YOVI PET plans to prioritize establishing cooperative relationships with veterinary hospitals, and then further connect with pet stores and other pet service institutions. Veterinary hospitals have a relatively mature customer base and clear health demands, while pet stores can cover scenarios such as grooming, boarding and daily care. Through resource integration, YOVI PET can avoid building complete offline facilities from scratch, and establish a service network in an asset-light manner.
Another target user group of this model is middle-aged and elderly pet owners.
As digital services continue to penetrate into daily life, some middle-aged and elderly users still face barriers to accessing services in links such as appointment booking, registration, online communication and transportation arrangement. When a pet suffers from a sudden illness, the problem will become more complicated: the owner not only needs to contact the veterinary hospital, but also may need to arrange vehicles, carry the pet, accompany the pet to see a doctor, and complete continuous care after the pet is discharged from hospital.
In the past, such demands often had to be met by children, relatives or friends. But for families whose children work in other cities or even live overseas for a long time, it is not easy to get temporary help from acquaintances. For users, paying for professional services essentially means replacing part of the care pressure in acquaintance relationships with market-based services.
YOVI PET hopes to become a professional connector in this service gap, enabling users to find trained and managed service personnel through a stable platform when needed.
Moving from one-time transactions to full life-cycle pet services
YOVI PET does not regard pet funeral service as a separate end-point business, but hopes to enter families from the earlier young, middle-aged and old stages of pets, and build user relationships in the process of long-term service provision.
Its service logic can be summarized as: providing daily care and health management in the young stage, focusing on health maintenance and chronic disease prevention in the middle-aged stage, providing chronic disease care, rehabilitation, grooming, medical visit accompaniment and door-to-door services after entering old age, and further extending to end-of-life companionship, personalized farewell and life cultural services at the end of life.
This model solves the problem of low customer acquisition frequency of traditional pet funeral businesses. If pet life services only reach users at the end of a pet's life, the user demands are characterized by low frequency and suddenness, making it difficult to identify potential customers in advance. On the contrary, providing long-term care services from the time when pets enter the middle-aged and elderly stage can establish trust relationships in advance. When pets really enter the end of their life, users already have long-term cooperative service institutions, and life care naturally becomes an extension of the original service relationship.
YOVI PET also plans to build a talent system of "pet life care specialists", and improve the professional competence and service standards of door-to-door service personnel through systematic training, assessment and continuous education. The talent pool can cover relevant professionals in pet medicine, pet care and other fields, providing new career paths for talents with professional backgrounds who do not want to take basic positions in traditional veterinary hospitals for a long time.
After the platform matures, YOVI PET also plans to further export service standards and training systems, so that professional service personnel can enter the home service market under unified processes, safety specifications and service standards, thus promoting the current scattered door-to-door pet services to develop in a professional direction.
The service itself will also become an entry point connecting other consumer demands. During the pet care process, demands for cleaning supplies, nursing products, daily necessities, senior pet products and related health products will arise. YOVI PET plans to build a curated supply chain around the home pet care scenario, screen and recommend related products, focus on safety, practicality and pet adaptability, and generate product revenue in addition to service revenue.
At the same time, YOVI PET plans to build a digital life file to permanently store pet growth records, health information, photos, videos and family stories, providing users with continuous health management and digital memorial services.
From the perspective of business model, YOVI PET's initial revenue mainly comes from services such as door-to-door care, medical assistance and medical visit assistance, and will gradually expand to membership services, senior pet care, life care, digital memorial and curated product supply chain in the follow-up, finally forming a combined model of "service revenue + membership revenue + product revenue".
At present, China's pet consumer market is still in the stage of structural upgrading. According to the *2026 China Pet Industry White Paper (Consumption Report)*, the urban dog and cat consumer market size reached 3.126 trillion yuan in 2025, and is expected to reach 4.05 trillion yuan in 2028; the industry's growth focus is also shifting from pure growth in the number of pets to per-pet value, health management and service consumption.
In YOVI PET's view, what is really worth paying attention to in the pet service market is not just the pets themselves, but the family consumption and social service demands behind the pets. Especially under the background of continuous population aging, middle-aged and elderly pet owners are forming a segmented market with long-term service value. Pets are not only family members, but also emotional entry points connecting service institutions and family demands.
At present, YOVI PET has completed the development of the official website MVP test version, initially built an offline service resource network, and is docking with veterinary hospitals, pet stores and professional service personnel. The project plans to take Wuhan as the first market, prioritize completing the construction of cooperation networks with veterinary hospitals and pet stores, verify the business model of door-to-door care, medical assistance and services for middle-aged and elderly pet owners; after completing verification in Wuhan, it will replicate the model to other cities in Hubei Province, and further expand to major cities across the country.
YOVI PET is currently in the angel round financing stage, planning to raise 5 million to 8 million yuan. About 35% of the funds will be used for product construction to complete the development of mini-program and digital life file system; 35% for market expansion to build regional service networks; 20% for service system construction, including personnel training, standard formulation and service management; 10% for team building, focusing on recruiting talents for positions such as pet medicine, service operation and internet product.
In the long run, what YOVI PET hopes to establish is not a single pet funeral or door-to-door care institution, but a set of service networks formed around the long-term relationship of pet-owning families: taking home care as the entry point, building trust through professional services, improving user value through full life-cycle services, and expanding business boundaries through supply chains and digital products.
In this process, pets are only the entry point of services, and the core problem to be solved is the connection between home care, aging society and professional service supply. For YOVI PET, the brand concept of "Every journey has a start, every companion has a warm end" is also the core logic it tries to establish for long-term business relationships.