I started PETVITY because I lost too many years with the wrong dog food.

This is a longer letter than I'd usually write. But if you're reading this — if you've already started thinking about your pet's healthspan, not just their lifespan — I want you to know exactly who built this and why.

My name is Manuel Riegner. I'm Swiss. I've spent the last decade building things at the intersection of health-tech, longevity science, and premium lifestyle. And along the way, I had a quiet realization that I couldn't shake:

"We've spent twenty years learning how to add good years to human life. And almost none of that knowledge has reached our animals."

The first time I saw healthspan — and missed it

A few years ago I got a Border Collie. She was four months old, sharp-eyed, ridiculously smart. The breeder gave me a bag of generic kibble and said "this should last you." I didn't know any better. I trusted it. For three years that bag — and the next ten that followed — was the bottom of her health stack.

By the time she turned six, she had inflammation markers off the chart. Her coat dulled. She slept more. The vet shrugged: "She's getting older." But she wasn't old. She was middle-aged at six because nothing in her daily life — not the food, not the routine, not the supplements no one had told me about — was actually built for longevity.

I started reading. I read everything. Epigenetics in dogs. Mitochondrial decline in cats. Joint biomarkers. The microbiome work that the human longevity world had been doing since 2017 but nobody had translated for animals. I built her a protocol from scratch — anti-inflammatory diet, NAD+ precursors, targeted movement, sleep architecture, environmental enrichment.

Eight months later, her bloodwork looked like a 3-year-old's. Her vet said she'd never seen anything like it. And I understood, finally, what I had cost her in those first six years just by trusting the default.

What PETVITY actually is

PETVITY isn't another pet-supplement brand. It isn't a marketplace pretending to be a community. It's an attempt to do for animals what the longevity movement has done for humans — but with two non-negotiable rules:

1. It has to be measurable. The Pet-Harmony Score™ is our way of making something that's normally invisible — your pet's actual healthspan trajectory — into a number you can track over time. Across body, bond, lifestyle, and growth. It's not a marketing gimmick; it's the thing that lets us tell you whether what we're recommending is actually working.

2. It has to be gentle. This is the part most longevity products get wrong. Animals don't need optimization. They don't need biohacking. They need consistent, intelligent care that respects their species, their personality, the rhythms they were built for. Our framework — People · Places · Things · Technologies — is a way of building that care without anxiety, without overwhelm, without making love feel like a project plan.

Why Switzerland

Three reasons.

First: Swiss precision in regulation, science, manufacturing. When we say a supplement is third-party tested, it actually means something here. When our privacy policy promises your pet's health data won't leak, we're held to revFADP and GDPR — the strictest in the world.

Second: a culture that already takes animals seriously. Switzerland has the highest pet-spend per capita in Europe, a real veterinary research community, and a deep tradition of treating animals with dignity in legislation.

Third — and this is the personal one — Zürich is where I live. Monaco is where the wider longevity community already gathers each summer. Dubai is where the Gulf market is opening. We didn't pick three random cities. We picked the three places where this conversation is already happening at the highest level.

What 1% means

One percent of every membership dollar — every box, every course, every concierge service — goes to wildlife reserves and animal welfare. Not as a marketing line. As a structural commitment, written into the company.

The reasoning is simple: loving one animal is loving them all. If the way I cared for one Border Collie was wrong because I didn't have the knowledge, then there are billions of pets and wild animals out there with the same problem. Some of that has to flow back. We just made it the cost of doing business.

What I'm asking

If you're a pet owner: take 90 seconds and create a profile. It's free. The Pet-Harmony Score™ you'll see at the end is real — based on your animal's species, age, breed, daily routine, and current signals. That's all you have to do today. Everything else builds from there.

If you're a vet, a sitter, a pet-coach, a brand: come find us. We're building this with you, not at you. The Certified Pet Longevity Sitter™ program, the partner shop, the expert directory — all of it exists because the people who already do this work brilliantly deserve a platform that respects what they know.

If you're an investor or a media partner: we'd love to talk. The first 500 founder spots aren't just a pricing tactic. They're the way we're choosing the people who get to shape what this becomes.

The real reason I'm doing this

I think about my Border Collie's first six years a lot. The years I can't get back. Every time someone signs up for the free Pet Profile, what they're actually doing is letting me give to their animal what I couldn't give to mine.

That's the whole company, honestly. Everything else — the Swiss governance, the Monaco summit, the polo cup, the boxes, the Vimeo courses, the AI agents that scout new partners every Monday morning — is just infrastructure to make sure that gift actually reaches you.

I hope it does.