The pet healthcare market totals 86.3 billion yuan, with individual institutions accounting for 78.7% of the market share and the market concentration ratio standing at only 6.5%: PetMap plans to build a cross-brand appointment platform using structured data.
When pets fall ill, their owners usually go through a wave of information anxiety no less stressful than self-checking their own health conditions: they first enter the symptoms in a search engine, then switch to map services to check the distance, then browse ratings on review platforms, and finally ask for recommendations in pet groups and social media feeds. The only ultimate purpose of this series of actions is to find out which hospital to visit. Pet Love Map, an early-stage project in the pet medical service sector, is trying to bring all these operations into one single entry point.
As defined by its team, Pet Love Map is not a pet-focused version of review platforms, but a decision-making, appointment-booking and transaction platform for pet medical services: it uses structured data on hospital capabilities, departments, doctors, services and prices to convert information display into bookable appointments, and settles transaction results into data assets through in-store verification. At present, the project has completed its Minimum Viable Product (MVP) development and is in the stage of pending business model validation, seeking angel round financing.
The first step of seeking medical care for pets gets stuck at "not knowing which hospital to choose"
Pets cannot describe their symptoms on their own, nor can they tell their owners which hospital is good at treating their illness. Different from the relatively mature tiered diagnosis and treatment system and public appointment registration system in the human medical sector, there is still no unified cross-brand entry point for pet medical services to date. The information that pet owners can obtain is scattered: distance information is on map apps, word-of-mouth reviews are on review platforms, doctor competence information is shared in social groups, and prices are often only known when they arrive at the hospital. The decision-making chain is extended, and the cost of this falls on the pets themselves.
The root of this fragmentation lies on the supply side. Public data shows that the consumption market for dogs and cats in urban China reached 3126 billion yuan in 2025. The pet medical sector is the second largest sub-market after pet food, with a market size of about 863 billion yuan, accounting for around 25% of the total. In sharp contrast, the supply structure is extremely fragmented: there are 24619 registered animal diagnosis and treatment institutions across the country, among which non-chain independent institutions account for as high as 78.7%, chain institutions with five or more stores only take up around 21.3%, and the top five enterprises have a market concentration ratio of about 6.5%, while the chain rate of the US pet medical market has exceeded 30%.
This structure brings two direct consequences. For pet owners, there seem to be plenty of options to choose from, but there are very few comparable dimensions, so distance and ratings often become the only basis for decision-making. For hospitals, nearly 80% of independent institutions lack digital tools and stable customer acquisition channels. New customer acquisition increasingly relies on offline promotion, word-of-mouth from existing customers and platform ad placement, leading to continuously rising customer acquisition costs.
Beijing is the most typical sample of this contradiction. In 2025, the number of dogs and cats raised in the city reached 2.78 million, and the corresponding dog and cat consumption market size is close to 120 billion yuan, of which pet diagnosis and treatment accounts for 27.6%. There are 814 standardized pet hospitals and 2909 specialized pet stores in the city, ranking the second and third in the country respectively. High-density supply and high-unit-price demand coexist, but there has never been an entry point that allows users to compare distance, service capabilities, doctors, prices, reviews and available appointment slots on a single screen. Pet Love Map chooses to start its business in Beijing, precisely for the low validation cost brought by the high density of stores in a single city.
From information display to transaction-convertible appointment booking
At the product level, Pet Love Map has built a three-terminal system: the C-end for pet owners, the merchant management end for hospitals, and the platform management backend. The C-end covers LBS-based nearby hospital search, distance sorting, hospital ratings, display of departments and doctors, display of service items and prices, online appointment booking, phone appointment booking and in-store navigation. The merchant end supports store information, doctor, service and appointment management, account reconciliation and data statistics. The platform end is responsible for merchant and data governance, order verification and operation dashboard. The completion of the three terminals means that data maintenance on the hospital side and consumption decision-making on the user side can be closed in the same system.
The real difference lies in the closed-loop design. After completing the comparison, pet owners can directly generate an appointment, complete verification after consumption in the store, and the review will be fed back and precipitated as real data to support the next user's decision-making. This link turns the platform from an information yellow page to a transaction entry: reviews come from verified orders instead of anonymous ratings, price and doctor information are maintained by the merchant end instead of being crawled, and the credibility of data increases with the growth of transaction volume.
Compared with existing products, the positioning of Pet Love Map is relatively clear. Local life platforms such as Meituan and Dianping have store pages, but lack structured fields such as doctors, departments and available appointment slots. The proprietary applications of chain groups only serve their own systems and cannot support cross-brand comparison. Pet profile platforms focus on identity and health file management, and do not enter the transaction process. Cross-brand support, structured data and verifiable transactions form the three core differentiators that the project is trying to build.
Run through the operation in one city first, replace scale-oriented narratives with business closed loop
In terms of commercialization, Pet Love Map has not finalized its final charging model. The charging logic given by the team is: merchants pay not for information display, but for new customers brought by the platform. At present, the team is verifying three solutions. The first one is performance-based payment, which means charging by valid appointments or in-store customers brought by the platform, with a reference range of 30 to 80 yuan per valid customer. The second one is merchant membership, which means paying SaaS service fees monthly or annually to get store display, appointment management, doctor and service management, data statistics and user source analysis. The third one is a hybrid model combining the above two. The team said that the final model will be determined by the A/B test results of the first batch of partner hospitals, rather than being preset.
The current progress is also presented based on real data. In the MVP stage, Pet Love Map has completed data collection of 62 stores in Beijing, accumulated 273 reviews, and built the three-terminal system covering C-end, merchant end and platform management backend, with capabilities of LBS search, appointment booking, navigation and data statistics. At the same time, the project has not yet signed any paying merchants, nor has it generated any platform appointment orders or revenue. For early-stage projects, stating the completed parts and pending validation parts separately helps build trust more easily.
In terms of the team, Pet Love Map is currently led by a sole founder who has completed product design, technology R&D and MVP construction, which is in the Founder-led MVP stage. This angel round of financing is planned to be used for recruiting business and operation leaders, providing cold start subsidies for the first batch of partner hospitals, and iterating the product and data system. The near-term goal set by the team is very specific: to sign about 10 hospitals in Beijing, reach 100 real users, run through the full link from appointment, in-store visit, consumption, verification to review, and verify whether hospitals are willing to pay for new customers brought by the platform. If the closed loop is proven valid, the next stage will expand to more than 100 hospitals in Beijing and finalize the unit economic model.
In the long run, the barrier that Pet Love Map aims to build is not a single application function, but a gradually accumulated data network: store data, hospital capabilities, doctor data, service prices, user reviews, appointment records and real consumption data are interconnected, and finally form cross-brand pet medical service data assets. In a fragmented market where the chain rate is only about 20% and the industry concentration ratio is less than 7%, the party that first masters transaction-supporting structured data is more likely to become the infrastructure connecting pet owners and pet hospitals.