PetScreening.com, a first-of-its-kind screening platform that empowers property managers to outsource their pet risk assessment and assistance animal validation processes at no charge, announced it has closed a Series Seed round of venture capital financing. Fenwick & West represented PetScreening.com in the transaction. Grotech Ventures led the Series Seed round with Camber Creek and Relevance Capital as additional participating partners.
The invested capital will enable Petscreening.com to increase the sales and marketing resources it allocates to the apartment industry, and also will position the company to pursue additional software integrations beyond its current integrations with Yardi Voyager and RealPage's OneSite.
"We are extremely honored and grateful for the confidence and support of these strategic, top-tier venture capital investment firms," said John R. Bradford, III, founder of PetScreening.com. "We believe our solution offers the most efficient and effective way to manage reasonable accommodation requests for assistance animals and reduce pet-related liability risks. This Series Seed round will better position us to bring our technology and vast database of behavioral information on tens of thousands of pets and their owners to more apartment operators and the rental housing industry while creating a more seamless experience and valuable tool for pet and animal owners."
PetScreening.com serves as the apartment and rental housing industry's only end-to-end pet screening solution. The platform adds an extra layer of liability protection for apartment owners and property managers, helps validate reasonable accommodation requests for assistance animals and provides a proprietary FIDO Score™ for household pets. It also ensures residents are held accountable for unauthorized pets, among additional features. The FIDO Score™ comprehensively assesses the housing-related risk of allowing a specific pet to live at a rental property.
Over the last year, PetScreening.com has screened more than 50,000 household pets and reviewed more than 10,000 reasonable accommodation requests for assistance animals. At the same time, the company has captured critical liability data, including violent pet behavior, pet-related property damage and even incidents of owners not picking up pet waste. The data has helped property managers better manage their pet-related risks with more than 1 million rental units having registered for the service.
About PetScreening.com
PetScreening.com™ is a free service to property managers and housing providers that helps hold all residents more accountable regardless if they have no pets, pets or assistance animals. Our no-charge service can help generate significant net-new pet-related revenue opportunities. The proprietary screening platform adds an additional layer of liability protection by having astandardized process when dealing with pet-free residents and household pets and assistance animals. It also helps with the validation ofreasonable accommodation requests for assistance animalsthrough our comprehensive legal and FHAct/HUD guideline review process. For household pets, the end result is aPet Profile with FIDO Score™ based on pet specific information such as breed, pictures, weight, vaccination records, and behaviors. For residents without pets our service codifies the formal record that each resident understands policies and rules related to no pet visiting or sitting which helps reduce the number of unauthorized pets.
About Fenwick & West
Fenwick & West LLP provides comprehensive legal services to leading technology and life sciences companies — at every stage of their lifecycle — and the investors that partner with them. For more than four decades, Fenwick has helped some of the world's most recognized companies become and remain market leaders. The firm has offices in Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Seattle, New York, Santa Monica and Shanghai.
About Grotech Ventures, Washington, DC
With locations in Denver, Hunt Valley, Md., and Arlington, Va., Grotech Ventures seeks to be an early investor in high-potential technology companies. Since 1984, the firm has invested more than $1 billion in more than 150 companies.
About Camber Creek, Washington, DC
Based in New York and Washington, DC, Camber Creek provides strategic value and capital to operating technology companies focused on the real estate market. The firm's investors are some of the leading owners, operators and managers of real estate in the U.S., giving Camber Creek a unique competitive advantage as an investor and value-added partner in the real estate technology space.
About Relevance Capital, Nashville, TN
Relevance Capital, headquartered in Nashville, Tenn., focuses its investments on health and wellness solutions as well as scalable software and technologies. Among its investment criteria: solutions that target a market of at least $1 billionand that have a positive social impact.
