The story behind Pawdex

Luna made me
build this.

She's a Lurcher, seven and a half years old, all legs and personality. I rehomed her and she immediately decided the sofa was hers.

Over the years, Luna has had her fair share of vet visits. Stomach issues, limb problems at different points, the kind of ongoing health history that builds up slowly without you really noticing. You start keeping a mental note of what happened when, what the vet said last time, whether this episode feels familiar.

That mental note gets pretty full after a few years.

When she had a bad stomach episode last year, I put in an insurance claim. It was denied. Scavenging, they said. She probably ate something on a walk. I had no timestamps, no pattern, no history of what she'd been eating or when the symptoms started.

That was the moment I started thinking seriously about building something.

The other problem was that I'm not a vet. When Luna was sick I often didn't even know if what I was seeing was actually a problem. Yellow vomit means something different to white vomit, and I had no idea which was which or why it mattered. I just knew something was off. And because I didn't know which details actually mattered, I wasn't tracking the right things. Time of day. What she'd eaten before. Whether it had happened at the same time last month. I'd turn up to appointments unable to have a proper conversation about what I'd been seeing.

There were smaller moments too. Luna eyeing something in the garden and me having no idea whether it was harmless or something I needed to act on immediately. Wanting to give her something from my plate and not knowing if it was safe. I wanted to be able to take a photo and just get an answer, fast.

And even if I had been tracking everything perfectly, I'm only human. I can't hold months of data in my head and spot that her stomach flares up two days after a long walk, or that three separate symptoms that seem unrelated are actually happening in the same week every time. That's not how people think. But it's exactly how AI can help, if the data is there to work with.

I talked to a lot of other pet owners while building this. People with dogs managing arthritis, cats with kidney disease, Dachshund owners dealing with IVDD. What became clear was that the experience is almost always the same. You're doing your best with incomplete information, you can't always spot the patterns, and by the time you're at the vet you're reconstructing events from memory.

Life also changed. Luna now splits her time between two households. My ex and I still share her, and that creates its own challenges. Keeping a joined-up health picture across two homes means making sure nothing gets lost between handovers. What she ate that morning. Whether she seemed off before she left. Whether something that started at one house is still continuing at the other. Without a shared system, those gaps are easy to miss.

Every feature in Pawdex was built from one of those problems. The tracking, the AI analysis, the shared ownership tools, the vet reports. All of it started as something I wished I'd had.

Luna is doing well right now. Fewer flare-ups, back to her usual self.