Scooby's Club Raises $250K in Pre-Seed Round Led by TDV Partners to Expand Dog Care Network in Bengaluru

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Scooby's Club, a Bengaluru-based dog care startup, has raised $250,000 in a pre-seed funding round led by TDV Partners. The round was announced on 26 August 2026.

TDV Partners was the only named investor, and the company did not disclose a valuation or the equity diluted. Scooby's Club said it will use the funds to open two new properties across Bengaluru over the next six to twelve months, and to hire and train canine coaches to deliver an expert-led experience.

Founded in 2025 by Animeha Singh and Ankit Gupta, Scooby's Club runs professionally managed neighbourhood daycare and overnight boarding for dogs, aimed at working professionals and pet owners who want structured, supervised care. Singh, an XLRI Jamshedpur MBA, previously worked at consumer startups including Punch and Clinikk.

The company's model combines canine behavioural principles with purpose-built indoor spaces inside residential neighbourhoods. Every dog undergoes temperament testing and is grouped by size, which the company says allows safer, lower-stress socialisation. Its fully indoor, climate-controlled facilities use sound, scent and colour elements for mental enrichment, and it offers allergen-sensitive care, personalised attention and 24x7 CCTV access for pet parents to watch their dogs remotely.

Scooby's Club has said it aims to build a network of 100 properties across major Indian cities, using its neighbourhood-led model to place care close to where pet owners live. It cited market research putting India's pet care market at around ₹6,000 crore, growing at about 20% a year, with pet ownership rising around 5% annually.

Scooby's Club is built around a specific, growing anxiety: what a working dog owner does with their pet during the day, or overnight when they travel. India's informal options, home-based sitters, boarding tacked onto vet clinics, unregulated kennels, vary wildly in quality, and for a new generation of urban pet parents who treat dogs as family, that inconsistency is the problem the company is selling against. Its answer is a professionally managed, purpose-built space for short-term and overnight care.

The revenue model is straightforward services: owners pay for daycare and boarding by the day or night, and the company earns on utilisation of each property. What it is trying to make defensible is the experience inside the four walls. It designs fully indoor, climate-controlled hubs in residential areas, tests each dog's temperament, groups animals by size to reduce stress and conflict, and adds sensory enrichment and round-the-clock camera access. The pitch to owners is safety and professionalism they cannot get from an informal sitter.

The cost structure is that of a physical care business, not a tech platform. Every location carries a lease, a fit-out, climate control and trained staff, the canine coaches this round is partly meant to hire. Those costs are fixed per site and land before the revenue does, which makes utilisation, how full each property runs, the number that determines whether a hub makes money. Placing hubs inside residential neighbourhoods is the deliberate choice meant to drive that utilisation by being convenient enough for daily drop-offs.

However, being about a year old, the company has disclosed no revenue, occupancy or per-property economics, so the model's viability is still unproven. A single well-run flagship in Bengaluru shows the concept is attractive; it does not show that the second and third properties will fill up, or that a premium, staff-heavy format can hold its margins as it scales, which is precisely what the next 6 to 12 months are meant to test.

The market assumption changing behind this round is that dog boarding, long an informal business of home-based sitters and kennels attached to vet clinics, can be organised into a branded, standardised chain. Rising urban pet ownership and time-poor working owners are real tailwinds, and no one has yet built the trusted, multi-city brand for short-term dog care. Scooby's Club is a small early bet that the neighbourhood daycare hub is the format that captures it.

The model's appeal is also its constraint: it is physical, local and capital-intensive. Each property is a leased, fitted-out, climate-controlled space staffed by trained canine coaches, which means growth comes one real-estate lease at a time, not through software. That is the opposite of an asset-light platform, and it is why $250,000 funds just two new properties. Against a stated ambition of 100 properties, this round is a proof-of-concept cheque, enough to test whether a second and third hub can replicate the first, not to build the network.

Trust and safety are where a brand can actually differentiate here, and where the downside is asymmetric. Temperament testing, size-based grouping and 24x7 CCTV are sensible answers to the two things that make owners anxious about boarding: whether their dog is safe and whether it is cared for. If Scooby's Club standardises that and earns a reputation for it, the brand becomes the reason owners choose it over a cheaper local sitter. But a single serious incident at one location, an injury or an escape, travels fast among pet parents and can damage a young brand disproportionately, and operational consistency across sites is genuinely hard in care businesses.

The category is drawing capital, though mostly to adjacent segments. Vetic and Supertails have raised tens of millions for veterinary and supplies-led models, and Dr. Paws for clinics, but those are healthcare and commerce plays rather than boarding, which leaves the daycare niche relatively open. The largest execution risk is unit economics at scale: a premium, staff-heavy, real-estate-based service has to command prices high enough to cover fit-out and trained labour per location, and prove that each new hub reaches utilisation before the next is opened. Whether that maths works beyond a handful of affluent Bengaluru neighbourhoods is the question the next round will be raised against.

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