Fresh Hour Co., Ltd. (CEO Lim Kyung-ho) announced on the 14th that it participated in CES 2025 held in Las Vegas, USA from the 7th to the 10th (local time).
Fresh Hour operates Bapdog, an AI and big data-based pet healthcare diet solution.
Bafdog is a subscription service that analyzes the current health status, determines target diseases, and recommends 1:1 customized pet food based on the pet owner's input of information such as breed, weight, activity level, disease, and allergy through a personalized diet solution algorithm based on approximately 1 million pet healthcare cases. In 2024, it commercialized a personalized pet food diet solution through the diagnostic source technology for inflammatory bowel disease, obesity, and skin disease in companion dogs.
Regarding this, a Fresh Hour official said, “These diseases not only have a high incidence rate, but also require continuous aftercare such as prescription diets and drug treatment, so the medical management cost burden is very high. In particular, intestinal, obesity, and skin diseases in companion dogs are ‘progressive’ and have a very high rate of metastasis to other diseases, so if left untreated or when symptoms that can be confirmed with the naked eye appear, there are many cases where metastasis to other diseases has already occurred and surgical treatment may be required. Therefore, it is important to discover them early to prevent them from worsening, or to continuously prevent and manage them so that they do not recur even after treatment.”
He continued, “With Bapdog, you can predict diseases in advance just by asking questions, and even if you have already been diagnosed, you can accurately analyze the current progress of your condition. Through our own algorithm and an AI diagnostic model using microbial NGS data, you can diagnose your current health status and receive an analysis of your condition linked to the presence or absence of a disease.”
In order to diagnose a pet's disease through questionnaire alone, it is important to secure a large amount of data to ensure reliability as well as the validity of the model.
To this end, Bapdog ▲ standardized approximately 1 million pet breeds, weight, age, activity levels, and other biometric data with each disease, ▲ standardized the correlation between intestinal microbiota NGS cluster maps from approximately 500,000 feces and diseases, ▲ and enabled high diagnostic accuracy (92%) diagnosis of diseases through questionnaires alone using an auto-encoder/SVM model. This was achieved by securing the world's largest/highest level of data.
AI's judgment results and dietary solution results are visualized and displayed through the dashboard.
A Fresh Hour official explained, “Our solution has the advantage of high healthcare diagnosis and disease identification accuracy, and the advantages of 1:1 customized recipe recommendations and a regular subscription service of one-meal packaging based on each pet’s data. In the case of the regular subscription service, the optimal daily Kcal is derived based on the analyzed functional improvement diagnosis status based on a big data-based algorithm, and one-meal packaging is delivered every two weeks accordingly.”
Since its official service launch in December 2022, Bapdog has diagnosed and analyzed approximately 120,000 pets, and has subscribed to over 70,000 dietary solutions. It also has a very high fandom service with a subscription retention rate of 86%.
Also, based on the 'Companion Animal Science Project', we are conducting NGS diagnostic analysis of the intestinal microorganisms of 5,000 companion animals, which is the world's largest scale. We plan to track the intestinal flora of each companion animal in a short period of time, apply it to advanced disease diagnosis technology and develop pet food products, and develop scientific prescriptions using this.
Through these efforts, Bapdog Service has achieved annual sales of over 500 million won and is developing product services that link dietary solutions to high-involvement pet customers through collaboration with various large corporations.
The big data-based customized diet solution algorithm has signed an NDA contract with Thrive Pet Care, the largest animal hospital franchise in the U.S., and is supplying APIs. It has attracted two rounds of seed investment from the Yoon Min-Chang Investment Foundation, Chungbuk Creative Economy Center, and NFPitin Partners from 2022 to 2024, and is preparing for Pre-A investment in the first half of 2025.
A Fresh Hour official said, “We have already completed the US patent and PCT application for the technology for AI disease diagnosis technology for companion animals and the dietary solution algorithm based on microbial NGS in 2024, and have published a paper in the Korean Society of Animal Health, a KCI-level organization, to secure the excellence and rights of the original technology for the dietary solution.” He added, “In particular, we are building a dataset to expand the scope of testing beyond the diagnosis of intestinal diseases, obesity, and skin diseases, and we aim to continuously advance AI technology and build a solution system for prescription diets linked to this. Based on this, we aim to receive approval as an ICT animal medical device from the National Institute of Animal Quarantine in 2025.”
In addition, he said, “By participating in CES 2025, we plan to understand the trends of the global pet healthcare market including the U.S. and establish a full-fledged overseas expansion strategy,” and “In particular, it has become an opportunity to build partnerships with local pet telemedicine companies, pet insurance companies, and pet healthcare product distributors, and we plan to continue to approach the global market in 2025.”
Meanwhile, the world's largest IT exhibition 'CES', hosted by the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), is an exhibition where you can see the flow of innovative technologies around the world at a glance, and is held every January in Las Vegas, USA.
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