There are definitely companies and investors thinking/working in this space. They think if you can demonstrate an ability solve X in “staging” it has a chance to transfer to “prod”. It works better for some things (generally, simpler/smaller and deterministic things) than others.
Practically speaking, the human health space is heavily regulated, and the costs associated with compliance are high. Intuitively, to me, there are not many health-specific innovations that one can discover in pet care that will lead to reduced costs in human care. Because most costs are not technologically-induced, rather they’re regulatory or bureaucratic.
You can iterate towards a better mouse trap in pet-land, but the time and financial costs of getting that mouse trap FDA-approved do not magically go away, and unfortunately human care is not a very free market, so being a 10x better mousetrap is not enough to break through.
The human healthcare market is also stupidly bigger than the pet care space, like 100x depending on what you include in each category. So if you’re after the big bucks, which most investors / investees are, it’s still generally worth it to target humans first.
That being said, some are seeing pets as an angle because human stuff is proving so hard and slow-going, they’re willing to experiment with any potential shortcuts.
Worked in human health and pet health.