Shoes for dogs

Zoof Pets makes five kinds of shoes—Boots (the flagship product), Casuals, Plops, Grips, and Ethnic, each serving a different purpose.

Sunday August 07, 2022 , 3 min Read

“Who run the world? Girls.”

And Beyoncé wasn’t wrong.

On Saturday, at Commonwealth Games 2022, the Indian women’s cricket team scripted history by securing the country’s first-ever cricket medal by defeating England by four runs.

In other news, Jagdeep Dhankhar has been elected to be the next Vice President of India.

Meanwhile, New York is set to welcome a two-day pop-up restaurant, which will serve catfood-inspired dishes…to humans. On August 11 and 12, the “Gatto Bianco by Fancy Feast” event will serve dishes made by catfood company Fancy Feast’s in-house chef Amanda Hassner, in collaboration with Michelin Star-winning chef Cesare Casella.

The purr-fect feast? Reality is really stranger than fiction.

Shoes for dogs

From pebbles and broken glass to hot pavements and roads, there are several things that can hurt a dog’s paws. Enter Zoof Pet, which, according to the founders Aneesha Pillai and Deepak Gupta, is the only startup in India to design and manufacture dog shoes.

The Mumbai-based startup is bootstrapped and says it generates enough revenues for the founders to plough money back into the business to make more products and iterations.

Paw protect:

Zoof Pets makes five kinds of shoes—Boots (the flagship product), Casuals, Plops, Grips, and Ethnic, each serving a different purpose.
The startup has sold around 10,000 sets in India in three years. It also sells a type of raincoat, waterproof collars, leashes, and a paw balm for dogs.
The price of Zoof Boots, which are sold as a set of eight pieces, starts from Rs 799.

Earn money by betting on news

Given the influx of news on social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or WhatsApp, it is often difficult to differentiate between information and opinion.

Aware of this problem and keen to do their bit to resolve it, IIT Roorkee alumni Divij Goyal and Ankit Shrivastava started TradeX, a trading platform for future events, in January 2021. The app was also a part of Y Combinator's Winter 2022 cohort.

Bet on news:

TradeX lets people trade on “opinions that matter to them” and “events that affect their daily life”, be it politics, COVID-19, Bollywood, or entertainment.
The prediction market startup works as a new-gen stock exchange, letting people use their opinions to earn money.
The app has more than 5,000 downloads on Apple's App Store and 500,000 downloads overall.

Inside Pine Labs’ journey

When it was founded in 1998 by Lokvir Kapoor, Pine Labs’ main focus was smartcard-based payment and loyalty solutions for the retail petroleum industry. Eleven years later, in 2009, it entered the world of mainstream payments, offering solutions to merchants and connecting them with banks and financial services providers.

In 2021, the Sequoia-Capital-backed firm raised $600 million from US-based asset management firm Fidelity, Blackrock, and others, followed by a $100-million fundraise from US-based Invesco Developing Markets Fund. YourStory takes a deep dive into the journey of the merchant banking and lending company.

The making of Pine Labs:

In 2012, the company launched its first unified point-of-sale (PoS) platform using cloud technology to drive retail revenues and reduce costs.
The first customers of the payment platform were Future Group and Shopper’s Stop.
Last year, the company launched a payment gateway, Plural, to help new-age direct-to-consumer brands accept digital and credit-linked payments.