A Tokyo startup thinks portable pet health records could be as transformative as portable medical records were for humans. They might be right.
Sarah Chen moved from Sydney to Melbourne last year. She spent three hours at her vet’s office getting copies of her dog’s medical history: vaccination records, surgery notes, dietary restrictions, medication allergies.
“I paid $80 for printed copies,” she says. “My new Melbourne vet couldn’t read half of it because the formats were different. We redid tests they’d already done. Cost me $400 and stressed my dog unnecessarily.”
This isn’t a Sydney problem. It’s global infrastructure failure costing billions annually and creating serious animal health risks.
The Fragmentation Tax
Pet care is a $150+ billion global industry built on incompatible data systems. Your veterinarian uses one system. Your groomer uses another. Your boarding facility uses a third. Your pet insurance company uses a fourth.
Switch providers? Medical history gets lost, recreated, or ignored.
The consequences go beyond inconvenience:
- Medication errors: New vets don’t know about drug allergies or current prescriptions
- Unnecessary testing: Duplicate bloodwork and procedures because records aren’t accessible
- Missed diagnoses: Symptoms that make sense with full history look random without it
- Emergency delays: Critical minutes lost recreating history during crises
According to the American Veterinary Medical Association’s 2024 Economic State of the Veterinary Profession report, record fragmentation contributes to 15-20% of unnecessary veterinary costs in developed markets. In the U.S. alone, that’s $15-20 billion annually in preventable spending.
What Japan Already Figured Out
Walk into a Tokyo pet care facility and the experience is fundamentally different.
The groomer already knows medical history, anxiety triggers, handling preferences, dietary restrictions. Notice something wrong? A skin issue, behavioral change, unusual symptoms? They walk the animal directly to their in-house veterinarian. The vet pulls up complete records instantly.
“Last week I noticed a lump on a poodle during grooming,” explains Takeshi Yamamoto, a Tokyo groomer. “Walked the dog to our vet within minutes. Benign cyst, simple treatment. In most countries, that requires the owner to notice it, schedule an appointment, wait weeks, explain the history. By then a minor issue could be serious.”
This isn’t technology magic. It’s infrastructure Western markets haven’t built: comprehensive pet profiles that follow animals throughout life, accessible across all service providers.
Japan shows notably higher service utilization rates than Western markets. According to TGM Pet Care Survey 2023, 61.1% of pet owners regularly use veterinary services, with pet hotel (19.9%) and grooming services (5.7%) also seeing strong adoption. While products still dominate market share, services represent Japan’s fastest-growing pet care segment, driven by integrated care models where groomers, vets, and boarding facilities share information seamlessly.
The Business Case for Integration
PetsTokyo Global, a Tokyo-based operator with nine locations across Japan and Australia, built its model around solving the data problem first.
Every pet in their system has a comprehensive profile: medical history, grooming preferences, behavioral notes, dietary requirements, service history. Staff access complete context before the pet arrives.
“Most pet businesses treat each visit as a transaction,” notes Dr. Sugiura Hiroaki, PetsTokyo Hospital Principal Director. “We treat it as a chapter in an ongoing relationship. The groomer who sees your dog today should know what happened at the vet visit last month.”
The numbers validate the approach. PetsTokyo’s Tokyo locations show 85%+ annual customer retention versus industry averages of 60-70%. Customers visit an average of 2.3 times monthly across all service types, triple the industry standard for multi-service pet facilities.
When PetsTokyo opened in Sydney six months ago, their biggest differentiator wasn’t service quality or pricing.
“Customers were genuinely surprised when we asked about their dog’s grooming preferences and previous health issues during booking,” says Sarah Chen, the Sydney location manager. “They weren’t used to anyone caring enough to ask. That became our competitive advantage.”
The Portability Problem
PetsTokyo’s system works within their network. But what happens when customers travel? Change cities? Need a specialist outside the network?
The company is building “PetFile,” a comprehensive pet identity and health record system that currently works within PetsTokyo locations. The vision extends much further.
“Pet owners change vets. They move cities. They travel with their animals,” explains Dr. Sugiura. “Right now that history gets lost. We’re building infrastructure to solve that problem, not just for our customers, but industry-wide.”
The company plans Q2 2026 announcements around making pet health data portable across providers, not just within PetsTokyo’s network.
If executed properly, this could represent the first serious attempt at universal pet health records, the equivalent of what electronic health records did for human medicine over the past 20 years.
Why This Matters Beyond Pet Care
The pattern is familiar to anyone watching enterprise software: fragmentation creates friction. Friction creates costs. Costs create opportunity for whoever solves interoperability first.
In human healthcare, companies that solved medical record portability captured enormous value. Epic’s 2023 revenue exceeded $4.9 billion. Cerner (now Oracle Health) sold for $28.3 billion. Athenahealth built a $5+ billion business. All on interoperability infrastructure.
In pet care, no one has done this yet. The market is larger than most realize. Global pet care spending exceeds $150 billion annually and grows 6-8% year over year according to Grand View Research’s Global Pet Care Market Report. Data infrastructure serving that market could be substantial.
PetsTokyo’s advantage: they’re building from operations, not theory. They know what data actually matters because they use it daily across veterinary, grooming, boarding, and training services. They understand pet owner workflows because they serve 80,000+ customers. They’re testing cross-border portability with real customers traveling between Tokyo and Sydney locations.
That operational foundation matters. Most attempts to build pet health record standards fail because they’re designed by technologists who don’t run pet care facilities. PetsTokyo is the reverse: operators building technology to solve their own problem.
The Questions That Matter
Can a pet care operator build infrastructure that transcends their own network? Will veterinarians, groomers, and other providers actually adopt a shared standard? Can you build a sustainable business around data portability, or does it become free infrastructure that benefits everyone but rewards no one?
The answers emerge over the next 12-18 months as PetsTokyo expands from 9 to 50 locations globally and reveals what they’re building beyond retail operations.
What’s already clear: someone needs to solve pet care’s data problem. The fragmentation tax is too high. The risks to animal health are too serious. The customer friction is too obvious.
Whether PetsTokyo is the company that does it remains to be seen. But they’re asking the right questions and building from operations that prove the value of integration every day.
In a market where most innovation means adding another app or another loyalty program, infrastructure that actually solves the core data problem would be genuinely differentiated.
And in a $150 billion global industry still running on paper records and incompatible systems, that infrastructure could be worth quite a bit.
This analysis is based on industry research, company disclosures, and publicly available information.
