Anna Skaya is in builder mode again, and her new company started much like her first successful venture: with a personal problem she wanted to solve.
In 2016, a spark of curiosity about the genetics of her own cats led Skaya [pictured above] to launch Basepaws, a cat DNA-testing startup she’d eventually sell to animal-health giant Zoetis in a nearly nine-figure exit.
Now, it’s her eyes. After a trip to Europe last year left her hooked on eye drops she couldn’t find back home in Miami, Skaya spent weeks hunting for anything comparable, only to find “white, plasticky bottles” with no design or branding. Most formulas she tried had preservatives and stung her eyes. So she created Moisture Oyster, lubricating eye drops for daily use.
“The idea was born out of my personal need and the recognition that it’s a massive market,” Skaya told Refresh Miami. “We do all this stuff for our hair, our skin, but not for our eyes. And we spend so much time in front of screens, which dries out our eyes. There’s a real need.”
She negotiated with the manufacturer in the Netherlands to ship the product to the US. Two months after launch, sales have outpaced where Basepaws stood at the same point, she said.
Skaya said she wants to transform eye drops — a boring and unglamorous product — into a lifestyle and personal care necessity. “No one has disrupted this segment,” Skaya said.
Moisture Oyster’s cute, mermaid-inspired aesthetic is a key part of that strategy. The teal and pink box comes in a sealed pouch with an iridescent central panel, giving it the look of a product that belongs on a Sephora shelf. The online store features a redhead model reclining on a giant shell, covered in pearls.
That founder-first perspective naturally informs her work on the other side of the cap table.
From founder to funder
After selling Basepaws to Zoetis, Skaya spent time searching for her next move. While exploring new concepts, she realized her heart was still in pet care, and that the fastest way to drive real innovation in the sector was to back other founders building in it.
As general partner at Ani.VC, a $35 million Miami-based fund launched in 2024 to invest in early-stage pet companies, Skaya is betting on the enormous potential for longevity innovation and for humanizing pet care. In the US alone, people are expected to spend <a href="https://americanpetproducts.org/news/u.s.-pet-industry-reaches-158-billion-in-2025-poised-for-continued-growth-in-2026″ rel=”nofollow noopener” target=”_blank”>$165 billion on pets this year, with 95 million households having at least one pet.
“Think about your favorite products for humans, you can probably make the same thing for pets,” she said.
Spotting those opportunities, and having the stamina to back them, comes from a career built on high-stakes execution.
Ukraine-born Skaya is no stranger to extreme hustle. Early in her career she survived working for the Samwer brothers, German entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, founders of tech incubator Rocket Internet, infamous for cloning US business models like eBay and Groupon through ruthless business practices. By 25, Skaya was running Groupon in Russia. She went on to build two more ventures: Breakup Buddy, a social network of women bonding over breakups, and ad-tech company VisualDNA, which she ran in Russia from 2012 to 2015.
She returned to the US, enrolled in Singularity University and in 2016, a year she described as “the heyday of personal genetics,” a talk by 23andMe founder Anne Wojcicki triggered a lightbulb moment. While recounting her investment in dog DNA company Embark Veterinary, Wojcicki said “someone should start a company and call it 23andMeow for all the cat people here,” according to Skaya.
“I went home and bought the 23andMeow.com domain, and that’s how the Basepaws story began,” she said.
Non-stop fundraising
Over six years Skaya built the company as a solo founder, researching genetics, science and everything about the pet industry, and knocking on dozens of doors looking for investors.
“Nobody took cats very seriously. I never had funding rounds. I had six years of continuous fundraising. It never stopped, I just never had enough money. I was always trying to make more,” she said. She applied four times to Y Combinator without success, and was rejected by Shark Tank the first time around.
But being dismissed repeatedly was a huge driver for her, she said. And her persistence and resistance, honed as a young cross-country athlete, paid off in a big way, earning her a $250,000 Shark Tank investment in 2019 that helped boost sales by over 16 times in a year and a half. It also put Basepaws on the road to a successful exit in 2022.
It turned out a cat DNA test company wasn’t just a cute idea. It became one of the largest feline DNA databases in the world. “That’s really why Zoetis bought us,” she said.
Closing Pet Care’s Funding Gap
The exit revealed a glaring gap in the pet industry. In Silicon Valley, successful tech founders routinely recycle their capital and hard-won playbook back into the ecosystem. In pet care, Skaya noticed that flywheel barely existed: most founders who cashed out simply left the space. When an early Basepaws investor suggested they team up to fix that, Ani.VC was born.
Today, Skaya uses that fund to search for founders with the same relentless drive she brought to Basepaws. Ani.VC has already backed 10 startups across animal health, pet tech, and consumer brands, writing pre-seed and seed checks ranging from $250,000 to $500,000.
Though she moved to Miami in 2021 on a whim after years in Los Angeles, Skaya says she found more than just a home. She sees Miami as the ideal launchpad for the next wave of pettech and consumer innovation: a city with growing capital flow and an appetite for fresh ideas.
Between Ani.VC and Moisture Oyster, Skaya isn’t just funding startups; she’s helping anchor a new tech vertical in South Florida. For a founder who spent years knocking on closed doors, building the ecosystem she once wished for feels like the ultimate full-circle moment.
HEARMORE from Anna Skaya on a recent episode of The #MiamiTech Pod:
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Adriana Brasileiro
Adriana Brasileiro is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and communications strategist based in Miami. She has reported and edited for Thomson Reuters, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and the Miami Herald, covering business, technology, climate and Latin America. A former communications leader at Meta, she is especially interested in South Florida’s startup ecosystem, artificial intelligence and the people using innovation to solve real-world problems. Send pitches to abrasileiromia@gmail.com.
Latest posts by Adriana Brasileiro (see all)
- Anna Skaya built a pet genetics company. Now she’s funding pet startups and creating something new, this time in Miami. – October 20, 2026
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