Twenty-one dog years at DIG Labs - digging deeper and unleashing personalized health plans.

Time flies. Last month marked my 3 year anniversary (AKA 21 dog years) at DIG Labs! We’ve been heads down building for the majority of 2022 - and I can’t wait to share what we’ve built, learned, and shipped this year. Spoiler Alert: it’s never been easier to unleash the power of visual information.

Transforming images into value - starting with just ONE photo.

At DIG, we believe a photo is worth a thousand words, yet few know how to maximize their potential.

Continuously inspired by our original mission of giving pets a voice in their own health and wellness, allowing pet parents to advocate for their needs in a way like never before, I’m proud to share that we’ve advanced our patent-pending AI software systems to unlock new image-based use cases to support pet parents in moments that matter.

Flash back to our early days (and today still!), when we describe what we do, the first question we usually get asked is: how many photos do you have? Through answering this question and canvassing adjacent industries, we realized that our capability of transforming small datasets into valuable commercial assets is really special - in fact, it’s what makes us differentiated from all the other AI companies out there that require massive datasets to demonstrate business value.

This is our secret sauce. And we’re proud to have touched the lives of pet parents over 60,000 times this year (and counting!).

Starting with pets felt right to us: after all, our pets can't tell us what's wrong. So, taking a photo and getting a personalized health plan felt like a huge unlock for us pet parents, struggling to find the best approach for our dogs’ unique situations. As we spoke to more of our customers, their veterinarians, and our advisors, we quickly realized that these support experiences can be abstracted beyond pets. 

We were approached by several companies, inspired by the impact we made in pet care - who wanted to apply the framework to their audiences. In fact, we discovered that the flows DIG created can help other businesses, and even other industries:

• Generate new leads for your brand
• Sell more preventative medical services
• Engage and delight customers to build trust and loyalty
• Drive internal operational efficiencies, especially in upstream R&D.
• Help support users when they need it most. 

Late last year, armed with this feedback and in-market learnings, we decided to flip the switch from helping more dogs to helping brand builders and innovators better connect with their existing audiences and achieve their company’s goals. 

From DTC to B2B

Since then, we’ve been having a blast, heads down building the B2B business - from adding some rockstars to the leadership team like Nicole, Anton, and Catherine -to entering new industries and helping our partners achieve their goals. Ranging from Fortune 50 consumer goods brands to early stage startups like Purrch and Foli-Q, we love helping our partners get even closer to their consumers.

From giving parents peace of mind during middle-of-the-night diaper changes, to enabling visually-oriented consumer research that helps companies generate breakthrough claims in record time, DIG’s been commissioned by some of the world's most trusted brands, and we’re honored to be part of the journey and to have made such a difference. 

That said, the business model evolution was not without a casualty - in July, we said farewell to our dog supplements line, including Pup Sup, our personalized all-in-one supplement. While this decision will allow us to laser focus on our business’ technology products moving forward, it was indeed bittersweet to part ways with our long-time loyalists, to whom we provided thousands of servings each month, and, according to one of our Pup Sup customers, “... are our friends and so much a part of helping our dog Hugo.”

Extending beyond pet health

After spending the past 3 years primarily focused on pet health image insight engines for a diversity of use cases ranging from stool to skin, I’m pleased to share that we've extended our patent-pending technology to serve a variety of use cases in the human health space, ranging from baby to beauty. While our love for pets still remains strong, this extension allows us to broaden our impact while continuing to operate DIG in the absence of outside investment since 2020.

In this evolution of DIG, we’re interested in partnering with new clients and users to co-develop computer vision models and insight engines.

Our ideal partners are health-focused consumer or medical brands who have an audience they’re having trouble engaging, or perhaps simply wanting to provide more value to as a means to stand out in a crowded marketplace.

Partnering with brands with existing audiences allows us to focus on technology, our superpower, and match up with stellar brands and audiences that already exist today. And we LOVE partnering with brands whose mission aligns with ours - unleashing truths for the right answer the first time; for supporting users through their most difficult times. 

If you’d like to talk about partnering with DIG Labs, please reach out! We’d love to chat. And until then, thank you for being a supporter of the DIG journey. Onward! 🚀