Fortune 500 company Zoetis announced Tuesday that it has an agreement to acquire Basepaws, a privately held pet care genetics company that provides pet owners with genetic tests, analytics and early health risk assessments that can help manage the health, wellness and quality of care for their pets.
The acquisition will advance Zoetis’ portfolio in the precision animal health space and will inform and shape its future pipeline of pet care innovations. Financial terms of the agreement are not being disclosed. Zoetis is based in Parsippany.
As a pioneer in pet care genetics, the California-based Basepaws offers easy-to-use genetic screening tools for the early detection of disease risk in pets, as well as individualized breed and health reports that can identify traits, biomarkers and potential hereditary conditions for pets. Basepaws helps pet owners and veterinarians understand an individual pet’s risk for disease and can lead to more meaningful engagements and increased likelihood of early detection and treatment of disease.
Abhay Nayak, Zoetis’ executive vice president of strategy, accelerated growth businesses and commercial development, said the acquisition will have impact.
“The Basepaws team has done an amazing job demonstrating how genetic testing and data can improve how we care for the pets in our lives,” he said. “With the addition of Basepaws, Zoetis will continue to strengthen our portfolio of products for precision animal health, across genetics, diagnostics and data analytics for pets and livestock. We are also excited by how Basepaws’ feline genomic and microbiome database will help enhance our R&D capabilities and inform the future of our pet care pipeline.”
Basepaws CEO Anna Skaya, who founded the company in 2017, feels the acquisition is a perfect match.
“Basepaws and Zoetis both consist of pet lovers with a passion for science, and our mission is to create better and longer lives for our pets through knowledge and data,” she said. “We look forward to expanding our business and the impact of our genetic products with the global scale and R&D experience of Zoetis, the world leader in animal health. We believe that, together, we can bring the benefits of a more proactive health care approach to pet parents around the world.”
