Launched by the Purina Accelerator Lab, the Unleashed accelerator programme is designed to be at the cutting edge of the next generation in pet services, novel nutrition and health technologies to strengthen the bond and the lives of our pets and their owners.
• Access leading industry expertise
• Meet our senior management
• Leverage our pet care network
• Get training & learning opportunities
• Get a dedicated Purina team to guide you in your startup development.
• Set key performance goals to prove your concept in 20 weeks.
• Get funding up to CHF 50'000.- to achieve mutual performance goals in a value exchange project over the 20 weeks.
• If your concept is successful in
solving our customers needs, Purina may provide you with further investment and/or funded collaborations.
• We are looking for either B2C or B2B approaches.
• You will be evaluated on the relevance to how well your business idea could answer customers problems.
• It is crucial that your business model is sustainable and scalable. This can include personalised nutrition or novel and differentiated ingredients and types of food.
At the moment, Unleashed collaborates with pet tech startups within Europe, including Turkey and Israel, Middle-East, Australia, New Zealand and Japan. If you are a sustainability focused startup, we collaborate worldwide. We're looking for teams driven by the same passion as us. When selecting startups to collaborate with, we're looking at the following :
Working with industry professionals from Nestlé Purina through Unleashed has transformed Vetwork to a more structured and data driven startup. It gave all stakeholders more confidence in our vision, and the company itself. We were able to fix our pricing and now we are able to generate and extra 60% on our check up fees, but our conversion rates were affected - positively. Now generating more per visit, and getting 20% more customers, only by the help of the Purina team fixing our pricing strategy.
Unleashed is not like the other acceleration programs out there. The first day, you define a goal together, the goal that is already on your roadmap, the one that your startup needs to achieve; and then Purina becomes a hands on partner. Their best professionals work with you side by side, day after day, for months. Until you reach that goal. And you can imagine they know quite a lot about pet food and pet parents. No need to say the impact this can have on a pet food startup. What about all the other things, like money, connections, investors, recognition and so on. Well you get all of that as well. But to me the most important thing is the real acceleration your project gets.
I can only recommend the Unleashed program to all pet startups. The Unleashed team is ready and willing to put all their heart and soul into it and I am pretty sure you will not regret it. It is so great how you are supported here.
I can seriously recommend the Unleashed accelerator to any pet tech startup, or any startup looking to expand into the pet space. Purina's support and experts have been amazing throughout the program.
We encourage all startups that feel passionate about pets to apply and join the Unleashed program. You'll be able to receive all the support you need to make your project reach all of it's potential. Thanks to Nestlé, Purina and all of our great partners, we turned our idea into a reality, and we hope that you can do so too.
"Thanks to Unleashed, we were able to analyze the markets to better understand our future users and the features that they like. This helped us to implement a consistent communication and growth strategy, which we did not have before the accelerator"
"The Purina Unleashed team has been awesome helping us with out of the box thinking and helping us achieve our goals. They are really highly skilled professionals who truly know the pet business. I highly recommend you to participate in the program"
"For us, Unleashed has really functioned as a structured platform from which we can engage with Purina to the full. Startups joining the Unleashed program can expect a well-resourced and transparent co-development process with Purina across multiple business functions. From my experience, this is actually quite unique when starting a new relationship with a large corporate, and it's been an absolute joy to participate in"
Being part of the Unleashed programme for Animoscope really has delivered it's business acceleration objective.
What's impressed me the most has been the team, and how well suited they are to our project. Not only do they bring the expertise and the experience, but they've provided a huge amount of attitude and a brilliant enthusiasm, which has really meant that we've been able to deliver something special in our time at Unleashed.
I’ve been so impressed with the Unleashed program, and rate this as an A++ among incubator models! It’s relevant to note that I’ve spent many years evaluating, building and leading business incubation programs worldwide, and serving on the board of a global network of business incubators too, and I’ve never seen a program as stellar as this one. The immersion and engagement by the Purina leadership team, working in close collaboration with leadership from each of the companies in the cohort, have enabled significant learning and the accomplishments of key milestones in a very short amount of time. Truly a win-win for all parties involved!
It's been great working with Purina. The Unleashed program is very well structured, and it is such an enjoyable experience working with the whole team. A big thank you for this opportunity. During the program, we progressed with some of the projects we wanted to push forward for sometime, in particular, with regards to developing our B2B business further. We have so much potential in that area, and it is exciting to see how much more we can do with Purina in the future, given we share so many of our basic beliefs. Unleashed has been a very useful opportunity to accelerate the development of our products together with the leader in pet care.
Participating in Nestle Purina's Unleashed accelerator has been one of the best strategic decisions our startup took so far! Unleashed is a program that is action-packed: we were assigned a great team of experts from Purina that perfectly complemented our needs, we connected with top-level industry partners, and we were able to stress-test our business model in the real world of the pet care industry. Unleashed has been a very useful opportunity to accelerate the development of our products together with the leader in pet care.
The program has been extremely valuable for us because of 2 reasons: Operationally we could not have done it this way without the program and the huge support from the team. In terms of timeframe, it helped us to move the project, otherwise we will have it in the back drawers and say someday we will move it… If we were alone, we probably would have a harder time getting started. We really look forward to the next steps. We know that your team over here in Portugal is very excited about this and hopefully we can expand it to other countries as well.
Having worked for many years with large corporations in marketing before becoming an entrepreneur - I do know the scale and nature of companies like Nestlé and Purina which can make it difficult for innovators to connect with them. I am hugely impressed how Unleashed enabled the introduction and support for small start-ups to work with Nestlé and Purina and allow cross-pollinating engagements. I have never seen this before in my professional life as a marketer and entrepreneur. This program is great and so well organised. We really appreciate the whole experience and the great professionalism behind it.
I have been really impressed by Unleashed. I have been looking for different types of corporate programmes and this is something really unique. We have been able to work with the professional management team from Purina and their real customers, and that has been very valuable for us. Our Purina team is extremely fun and engaged and inspiring to work with!