Estonian startup Stay With My Pet creates platform to help find a trustworthy carer for your pet

Estonian start-up Stay With My Pet has launched a membership-based web platform for all animal owners and animal lovers. Stay With My Pet brings together people who need trustworthy help with their pet and those who want to spend time with animals but, for various reasons, cannot commit to a pet of their own on a permanent basis. Interest in the service was already noticeable before the public launch – over a hundred people joined the waiting list, and the first pet-sitting arrangements have already been made through the platform. The company is among the nine start-ups selected for Tehnopol’s 2026 accelerator programme, out of 97 applicants.

In Estonia, having a pet is more the rule than the exception – according to Kantar Emor, more than half of all households have a pet, with dogs owned by close to 232,000 people and cats by around 383,000. Many owners repeatedly face the same question: who can they trust with their pet when going on a trip or to work, and neither friends nor family are able to help? At present, people mostly rely on family, acquaintances or social media groups – solutions that are not always readily available and do not offer the same peace of mind as a vetted community.

“Stay With My Pet grew out of a very personal problem,” says co-founder and CEO Gerly Kullamaa. “Over the years, I’ve experienced first-hand how difficult it can be, at the moment you need it most, to find someone you can trust with your dog with a calm heart. After getting my dog, I also discovered that I’m allergic to him – so I can’t always play with him as much as he’d like, and I’m genuinely grateful to anyone who comes round and spends time with him. When I talked to others about this, I realised I was far from the only one: many owners occasionally need help, while many animal lovers aren’t able to have a pet of their own on a permanent basis. Why shouldn’t these people find each other? That question is where Stay With My Pet grew from.”

Unlike conventional pet-sitting services, Stay With My Pet is built around membership and community. Users create detailed profiles, can rate one another, and all arrangements take place within a single secure environment. Pet owners and animal lovers don’t pay one another directly, but instead use the platform on a membership basis. Insurance cover is due to be added.

Both pet owners and animal lovers can join the platform. Both create a profile, on the basis of which they can find a suitable person for walking their pet, a home visit, or day or longer-term pet-sitting. The service is aimed at owners of all kinds of pets – not just dogs and cats, but also rabbits, birds and other small animals.

“As a dog owner myself, this worry is very familiar to me – I want to leave my best friend in the care of a trustworthy sitter only, but it’s often hard to coordinate schedules among family and friends,” says Stay With My Pet’s key mentor, Heidi Kakko. “For a service like this to create value for everyone and work well, it’s important that a sufficient number of animal lovers are actively using the platform. As a Tehnopol mentor and a dog owner myself, I can support the team in developing the service so that both owners and the sitters who want to look after their pets can enjoy them.”

Stay With My Pet’s goal is to reach 10,000 active users by the end of its first year of operation and to expand into other European countries. The company believes European market trends support this kind of growth: 140 million households in Europe – almost half of all homes – keep a pet, amounting to 306 million animals in total (FEDIAF, 2024).