Clean-label pet food startup Zoomies has raised ₹5 crore in a pre-seed funding round, as the young brand looks to deepen its direct-to-consumer push and widen its reach across India’s fast-evolving pet care market. The round was led by D2C Insider Super Angels, with participation from Zindagi Live Angel Fund and a group of founders and operators including Pallavi Mohadikar, Unacademy co-founders Gaurav Munjal and Roman Saini, and Astrotalk CEO Puneet Gupta.
Zoomies bets on clean pet food
For Zoomies, the fundraise is less about a headline number and more about timing. The company is entering a category where Indian pet parents are becoming more conscious not just about feeding their animals, but about what exactly goes into that food. The startup says it is building around that shift, positioning itself as a nutrition-first brand focused on complete pet meals made from 100 per cent real, human-grade meat, without additives, preservatives or synthetic supplements.
Founded in September 2025 by Sumedh Battewar, former co-founder and Chief Business Officer at EMotorad, Zoomies is being built with a fairly clear thesis: better pet nutrition should not remain a niche or premium-only proposition. Battewar is joined by co-founder Spriha Choubey, whose background includes growth, strategy, branding and community building. Together, the founders are betting that quality-focused pet food can be made accessible without losing the clean-label promise that increasingly resonates with urban consumers.
The startup says its products are designed to offer mass-market pricing while also delivering a shelf life of up to 18 months. That combination is central to its pitch. In a category where freshness, convenience, affordability and trust often pull in different directions, Zoomies appears to be trying to sit at the intersection of all four.
The newly raised capital will now be deployed across the building blocks that matter most for an early consumer brand: manufacturing, supply chain, distribution and visibility. The company plans to use the funds to strengthen manufacturing and supply chain capabilities, expand brand-building efforts through influencer-led campaigns, and grow distribution through quick-commerce platforms, direct-to-consumer channels and Amazon. It is also preparing for a broader geographic push into Bengaluru, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Chennai.
That expansion plan comes at a time when the larger pet food segment in India is seeing stronger consumer attention, driven by rising pet humanisation and a growing demand for better nutrition. Zoomies says it wants to address gaps around transparency and quality by offering products that are clean, affordable and lab-tested.
Explaining the company’s approach, Sumedh Battewar, co-founder and CEO, said better pet nutrition in India has for years been framed as either niche or premium, and that Zoomies wants to challenge that binary. He said the company is working to show that clean, meat-led nutrition can be shelf-stable, scalable and price-competitive, while also arguing that the market is ready for such a shift.
Spriha Choubey, co-founder, tied the business idea to a lived consumer gap. She said the company emerged from the founders’ own frustration as pet parents who struggled to find the kind of food they wanted to feed their pets, and from the belief that this demand for better-quality nutrition is shared by a wider pet parent community.
Investors backing the round are also reading the category through that same lens. Chhavi Bhardwaj Kargaonkar, Partner at D2C Insider Super Angels, said the firm was backing a team with execution depth in a pet nutrition space that needs innovation, adding that Zoomies is positioned to scale clean-label solutions for pet parents in India.
For now, Zoomies remains an early-stage company with an ambitious operating plan. But the core of its proposition is easy to understand: if Indian consumers are becoming more careful about what they eat, many are beginning to ask the same questions about what ends up in their pets’ bowls. Zoomies is trying to turn that behavioural change into a scaled consumer brand.
