PetSmart Acquires AllPaws to Enhance Adoption Efforts

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PetSmart Inc., the largest pet specialty retailer and leading resource for pet adoption in North America, announced on Wednesday, October 19, it acquired AllPaws. AllPaws is one of the largest online and mobile platforms that matches those looking to adopt a pet with pets ideally suited for their home, family and lifestyle. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

“Pet adoption is core to our purpose-driven business, and the acquisition of AllPaws offers a smart technology platform to accelerate our in-store adoption program even further,” said Michael Massey, president and chief executive officer for PetSmart. “Our leadership role in pet adoption has led to a record-setting 7 million pets adopted from our stores since we started the in-store adoption program in 1994. More than 3,000 current animal welfare partners—plus thousands of additional rescues and shelters—will be able to use AllPaws as a digital hub to promote adoptable pets, which we believe will result in even greater success in finding forever homes for pets across North America.”

Approximately 5,000 animal rescues and shelters across North America directly utilize AllPaws to promote their adoptable pets.
Thousands more animal welfare organizations will be able to use the centralized PetSmart AllPaws platform to create, populate and update detailed profiles for adoptable pets to increase their exposure and chance of being adopted. Prospective pet parents can then use AllPaws to search for pets by various search categories such as breed, age, gender, energy level, training stage, temperament and geo-location in order to find the pet best suited for their home, family and lifestyle requirements.

“We are thrilled to join the PetSmart family and to contribute to its mission of helping save pets’ lives through adoption,” AllPaws Founder Darrell Lerner said. “When we set out to develop AllPaws, we wanted to take a fresh and modern approach to pet adoption that combines a sophisticated, user-friendly functionality with deep social integration in order to connect prospective adopters with the best pet match possible. With PetSmart’s scale and PetSmart Charities adoption program leveraging more than 1,470 stores that serve as adoption centers, we believe AllPaws has found its forever home with PetSmart.”

The AllPaws pet adoption platform, which is free to all users, offers a comprehensive solution on the web and a fun, engaging mobile application experience on iPhone. Its iPhone app is frequently the top ranked adoption app on iTunes and has grown nearly every month since its launch in 2014. The platform has strong traffic, typically averaging 800,000-900,000 visits per month.

For every 30 seconds a PetSmart store is open, a pet is adopted, totaling 1,400 pets lives saved every day. Through these efforts, nearly 500,000 pets find forever homes every year.