The challenge
Elita is a venture-backed pet biotechnology company. It banks pets' stem cells while they're young and healthy, so they can be used to treat conditions like arthritis later in life. It's a forward-looking service, and like most forward-looking health services, it asks customers to make a decision today about a benefit years away.
That makes customer acquisition expensive. Pet owners need to understand the science, trust the company and see ongoing value before they commit. Traditional marketing can explain the offer, but it struggles to build the kind of everyday relationship that turns curiosity into commitment.
Elita saw an opportunity in something every pet owner already deals with: managing their pet's health. Vaccination certificates, vet visits, medications and symptoms are usually scattered across paper, inboxes and memory. An app that brought all of that together, and made it genuinely useful, could become part of an owner's routine and a natural doorway into Elita's core service.
The catch was the bar for quality. A pet health app only earns trust if its advice is relevant to that specific animal. Generic tips wouldn't cut it. Elita needed a consumer product sophisticated enough to understand each pet as an individual, built on AI that could be trusted with its history.
Our approach
Make capture effortless
Owners simply photograph their pet's records, such as vaccination certificates. The app reads them and stores the information in a Pinecone vector database, building a complete picture of each pet without manual data entry.
Ground the AI in the pet's own data
We built an AI vet chatbot on Google Gemini that answers questions with the pet's full history in context. Ask about a symptom and the answer reflects that animal's age, breed, records and past issues.
Personalise from day one
During onboarding, a personalised care algorithm sets up each pet's profile. The app then handles reminders and symptom tracking, so owners keep coming back for practical reasons. We delivered it as a native app built on Bubble.
The results
Elita went from brief to a product in market in five weeks, then hit its target of 100 beta users. Offering the app free changed the economics of growth. Customer acquisition cost fell by 70%. Instead of paying to explain stem cell banking to strangers, Elita could build relationships with pet owners through a tool they used for everyday care, then introduce its core service to people who already trusted the brand.
The product also showed what modern AI can do in a consumer health setting when it's built properly. Retrieval over each pet's own records, through the vector database, means the AI vet works from the right facts instead of generic information. That's the difference between a novelty chatbot and something owners actually rely on.
Capture from photos removed the biggest barrier to adoption in health apps: getting the data in. Owners didn't have to type out records, so profiles filled up quickly and the AI had something useful to work with from the first session.
For a venture-backed company, the combination matters. A lower cost of acquisition extends runway, and a richer understanding of each customer strengthens the case for the next raise. Elita has since won its category at SXSW Sydney Pitch 2025 and raised a $1.9M Series A in September 2026, taking total funding to $3M.
“Lightning were one of the few that were ambitious enough to take on our timelines and get something out in market in five weeks, to a high level of quality that we could start putting in front of people and gathering that feedback.”
“I really do value workshop time and being able to spitball, and [the team] coming here and solving problems together.”
What this means for your business
If your core product asks customers to make a big or long-term decision, a useful free product can be the most efficient acquisition channel you have. It builds trust through everyday value and gives you a relationship to grow from.
We design and build AI products grounded in each customer's own data, which is what makes them trustworthy and worth coming back to. From document capture to retrieval to the conversational layer, we handle the whole stack. If acquisition cost is limiting your growth, let's look at what a product-led channel could do for you.
