Does CatScanR Use Artificial Intelligence?

A look at how we think about AI — and what we actually do with it.

AI has been all over the news lately. Companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are racing toward public markets at near-trillion-dollar valuations. OpenAI has confidentially filed for an IPO targeting a valuation of up to $1 trillion, while Anthropic — maker of Claude — recently closed a $65 billion funding round at a $965 billion valuation and filed its own IPO paperwork shortly after. Meanwhile, Alphabet has been pouring tens of billions into AI infrastructure. The hype is real and very loud.

Because I - suki - was commissioned by CatSwoppr to build CatScanR together with Roman Babenko, people regularly ask me: are you doing anything with AI in the app?

Fair question. Here’s how we think about it.

CatScanR: An App Built Specifically for Cat Lovers

Before diving into AI, it helps to explain what CatScanR actually is and what we’re trying to achieve.

Under the CatSwoppr umbrella — our overarching entity — we run our Global Cat PR Agency and we are building the CatScanR app, designed to bridge the gap between online and offline cat love. CatScanR connects people who care for cats and cat enthusiasts — with or without a cat of their own — in real life. With the app you can discover cats nearby on the map, connect with fellow cat enthusiasts, and turn online conversations into real-world meetups, safely verified through our PawsUp system.

PawsUp works like this: when you meet someone in person, you scan each other’s QR code to earn a PawsUp. It’s a trust-building mechanism within the community — verified proof that you’re not just online, but genuinely active in the offline care of cats.

CatScanR also lets you create a rich, dedicated profile for your cat — something that platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok simply aren’t built for. On those platforms, you can’t create a proper profile for someone under 18 (which would technically include your cat), you can’t specify a breed — Maine Coon, Siberian, Sphynx, or plain old domestic shorthair — and there’s no straightforward way to simply mark your cat as male or female — which, biologically speaking, is all there is for a cat, among many other cat-specific details we’ve thought carefully about.

We’re built for real cat life. Whether you’re looking for a cat sitter or want to help strays, CatScanR connects you with the right people nearby. You can find a trusted cat sitter — search nearby, check profiles and PawsUp badges, message a sitter, and meet to hand over the keys with confidence. You can meet cat lovers while traveling — open the map in any city and instantly discover local cat enthusiasts, chat, meet up, and earn an Explorer PawsUp. Or you can coordinate stray feeding — post in the community feed about strays in your area, connect with fellow feeders, split schedules, and meet to coordinate care.

How We Think About the Term “Artificial Intelligence”

What does “artificial intelligence” actually mean? At CatScanR, we sometimes ask whether the term is accurate at all. Nobel laureate Sir Roger Penrose — the mathematical physicist known for his work on quantum theories of consciousness — has argued that what we call AI would be more precisely described as “artificial cleverness.” His point: something that depends on external input cannot truly possess its own intelligence or self-awareness.

From a different angle, you could describe current AI as tokenized probability statistics. What systems like ChatGPT actually do is predict the most statistically probable next token — a fragment of a word, a word, or a punctuation mark — one at a time, based on patterns absorbed from vast amounts of training data.

There is no understanding, no database being searched, no meaning being grasped. It is pattern completion at enormous scale. Extraordinarily useful — but not “intelligent” in any deep sense.

None of this is a criticism. It’s just an honest framing — one we think matters when deciding how and where to use these tools.

What Investors Want to See in Pet Tech Startups

In the pet tech startup world, accelerators focused on helping you to achieve funding from venture capital, angel investors, and institutional backers are increasingly keen to know how you’re using AI. This seems to be driven in large part by the hype — the widely (and sometimes uncritically) proclaimed potential of AI to transform any business.

There are two major accelerators that matter in the pet tech space. One is Leap Venture Studio run by Mars — whose petcare brands include Cesar, Pedigree, Catsan, Sheba, Whiskas, and Royal Canin. The other is Unleashed, run by Purina, a subsidiary of Nestlé. Unleashed has supported startups like Sylvester.AI and Petalife.tech. Both use photos — of your cat in Sylvester’s case, of your pet’s stool in Petalife’s — to generate a health analysis.

This raises a fair question about differentiation. What genuinely sets a startup like Sylvester AI or Petalife apart from simply uploading a photo of your cat — or your pet’s stool — to Claude or ChatGPT and asking for an analysis? The answer would theoretically lie in proprietary training data and specialized vision models fine-tuned on that data. But that’s also precisely where the real challenge sits.

Collecting sufficient, high-quality labeled data for feline health analysis from photos — or reliable diagnostic signal from images of animal waste — is genuinely hard. You need vast amounts of it, properly annotated, to train a model that meaningfully outperforms a general-purpose AI. Harvesting that data at scale is slow, expensive, and medically complex.

Cat facial recognition has the same problem: the datasets required to do it well are enormous and difficult to assemble. So while the ambition is legitimate, the bar for actually building something that goes well beyond “just ask Claude” is much higher than it might appear from the outside.

A separate development worth watching is on-device AI — small models running locally on hardware without a cloud connection. That could eventually be a genuine differentiator for wearables that monitor animal health in real time. But for photo-based analysis apps today, the training data bottleneck is the hard problem.

Does AI Actually Generate Financial Value?

At CatScanR, we stay modest. We don’t believe we’re an ultra-revolutionary pet tech startup set to disrupt everything. Our goal is simply to be a bridge between online and offline connection — and to ensure that people actually give cats real, physical attention, because cats deserve that.

The question we ask ourselves is this: does AI genuinely organize our activities better, or does it open up real new revenue opportunities? In what ways does it create measurable value — and where?

For us, the most meaningful application of AI would be in profile matching and discovery — helping users find like-minded cat lovers on the map, matched to the type of cat they have, their specific needs as a cat person in the real world: cat sitting, cat walking, coordinating care for strays. That’s where AI could create genuine value for our community, rather than being a feature bolted on to satisfy a pitch deck.

CatScanR: Still Being Built

So what’s the actual point of this post?

First and foremost, I want to encourage everyone in the pet tech world to keep building — whatever product or service you’re working on. I love seeing what’s happening and how technology is being applied.

At the core, I believe we’re all ultimately doing this to give cats a better life. We definitely shouldn’t be doing it to help investors extract a little extra profit at the expense of cat lovers.

To users of pet tech apps: keep looking carefully at who’s building what you use, and what values they hold — toward people and toward cats.

A useful example: in February 2024, private equity giant Blackstone acquired Rover for $2.3 billion, and Rover then acquired Cat-in-a-Flat — a cat-sitting platform founded by genuine cat lovers — in October of that year. Blackstone is one of the world’s largest alternative asset managers. Their business is generating returns for investors. That’s fine — but it’s worth being clear-eyed about it: the people ultimately in charge of Cat-in-a-Flat’s future are not cat lovers. They are capital allocators. As a user, your trust belongs with those who genuinely love cats.

I just felt like sharing some thoughts on how we see the pet tech landscape and AI’s role in it. Thanks for reading — perhaps until a next post.

Visit us at catscanr.app

Thanks, ciao meow,

suki