India’s pet care market is growing fast, but has pet healthcare kept pace with this growth? Where do you see the biggest gaps today?
Honestly, no — pet healthcare hasn’t kept pace. The rest of the pet care industry in India is booming. Food, grooming, accessories, wellness products — all of it is growing fast. A report by IMARC Group put the Indian pet food market at approximately USD 2.52 billion in 2025, projected to reach approximately USD 4.60 billion by 2034. But when it comes to paying for actual veterinary care, we haven’t built the financial infrastructure to match.
Here’s what I see as the biggest gaps:
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Most pet healthcare spending in India is still out-of-pocket. There’s no real financial cushion for pet parents.
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Insurance penetration is low, and even where it exists, it’s built for the worst-case scenario — surgery, accidents, major illness.
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The everyday expenses — vaccinations, vet consultations, medicines, diagnostics, preventive check-ups — aren’t covered by anything. Pet parents pay for these out of pocket, every time.
This is exactly the gap we’ve spent years solving in human healthcare. Insurance is important, but it doesn’t solve the cash flow problem of regular care. What pet parents need is a way to manage routine healthcare costs — not just protection against the worst case.
That’s why we partnered with Petos. We want to bring the same thinking to pet healthcare: structured payments, embedded financing, and a system built for everyday care, not just emergencies.
Many pet owners don’t hesitate to spend on food, grooming or accessories, but healthcare often gets postponed until there’s an emergency. Why do you think that is?
I don’t think it’s about willingness to spend. It’s about how people perceive the cost.
Food and grooming are predictable. You know what you’re paying every month, and you get something satisfying in return. Vet care doesn’t work that way — it’s random, unexpected, and hard to plan for.
Here’s how it usually plays out:
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Pet parents budget for food every month, almost on autopilot.
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Nobody budgets for diagnostics, medicines, or repeat vet visits — because they don’t know when those costs will show up.
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When they do show up, they compete with every other household expense that month.
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So prevention gets pushed back, again and again, until the problem becomes too serious to ignore.
We’ve seen this exact pattern in human healthcare too. Insurance is built for the big, rare events — but it’s the routine, everyday healthcare costs that actually wear families down.
What we’re trying to do is make healthcare spending predictable and manageable, not something people dread or delay. When you bring payments, rewards, and financing together in one system, prevention stops feeling like a burden — it becomes just another regular expense, like food.
Has the rising cost of veterinary care become one of the biggest challenges for pet owners? How can the industry make quality care more affordable?
Yes, absolutely — rising vet care costs are a real challenge, especially in our cities. As clinics upgrade their standards, diagnostics, and treatment facilities, costs go up. But people’s incomes don’t rise at the same pace. That gap is where the pain shows up.
I think the industry sometimes gets this wrong by treating affordability as a discounting problem. It isn’t. Affordability comes from good financial infrastructure, and that means a few things working together:
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Insurance for the big, unexpected expenses.
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Financing options for the smaller and medium ones that come up regularly.
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Incentives that genuinely bring down net healthcare costs, not just surface-level discounts.
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Payment platforms that make all of this easy to actually use.
At Qube, we look at affordability as a payments, financing, and cash flow problem — not just an insurance problem. That’s exactly why we’ve built our platform around all three: payments, healthcare cashback, and financing, working as one system instead of three separate pieces.
Everyone talks about pet insurance, but is insurance enough? What else does India need to make pet healthcare more accessible?
Insurance is essential, but on its own, it’s not enough. For humans and pets both, insurance kicks in for the big, infrequent expenses. Real accessibility comes from what happens in between — the everyday stuff insurance was never designed to cover.
I think India needs three more layers on top of insurance:
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A payment platform that works seamlessly across clinics, hospitals, pharmacies, and wellness centres — not one that stops at the vet’s door.
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Financing for the expenses that fall in an awkward gap: too big to pay off immediately, too small to justify an insurance claim.
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Digital tools that help families stay ahead of their pet’s healthcare, instead of just reacting when something goes wrong.
That’s the thinking behind our partnership with Petos. Pet parents get insurance and everyday healthcare costs handled in one place, backed by Qube’s payment and financing platform. This was never just about insuring pets — it’s about making their healthcare genuinely accessible.
Do you think India’s pet healthcare industry is where human healthcare was a decade ago, with financing and digital solutions only just beginning to take off?
In many ways, yes. Pet healthcare today reminds me a lot of where human healthcare finance was in its early days. Demand is growing faster than the financial infrastructure needed to support it.
A decade ago, when people talked about human healthcare, the conversation began and ended with hospitals, insurance, and clinical care. It took time for the industry to realise that payments, financing, and consumer engagement were just as central to the business of healthcare. I think we’re watching that same shift begin in pet healthcare now.
What makes me confident is this: India doesn’t have to build this from zero.
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We already have a mature digital payments backbone, with UPI adoption running deep across the country.
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Consumers are already comfortable transacting on their phones for everyday needs.
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That foundation means pet healthcare financing can move faster here than it did for human healthcare, because the hardest part — getting people used to digital payments — is already done.
As more young Indians adopt pets, how are their expectations changing the way companies think about pet healthcare and wellness?
Younger pet parents treat their pets as family, much more than earlier generations did. And that changes what they expect from us. It’s not enough to show up in an emergency anymore — they want prevention, wellness, convenience, transparency, and everything digital.
Here’s what today’s pet parents expect: they want to book a service online and pay for it online, with no friction. They want access to their pet’s full health history in one place. They want reminders for vaccinations, check-ups, and follow-ups, without having to track any of it themselves. And they want everything managed on a single platform, not scattered across clinics and paper records.
They’re also willing to invest in their pet’s long-term health, not just react when something goes wrong.
This is pushing the whole industry to shift — from a traditional, visit-by-visit veterinary model to a wellness-based one. Companies like ours need to think about the entire lifecycle of a pet’s health, not isolated transactions. That means bringing payments, wellness, insurance, and engagement together in one experience, because that’s exactly how this generation expects to use any service, healthcare included.
If you could change one thing about India’s pet healthcare ecosystem today, what would it be, and why?
If I could change one thing, it would be this: we don’t have a layered, connected approach to affordability yet.
Right now, a pet parent might have a good vet, a wellness program, and even an insurance policy — but none of these pieces talks to each other. They exist in silos. What I want to see is all of it working as one ecosystem: payments, insurance, financing, and prevention, connected instead of scattered.
This is really the bigger idea behind the work we’re doing in health finance infrastructure. Whether it’s a human or a pet, the problem is the same — nobody should have to choose between getting healthcare and staying financially comfortable.