While a 2025 American Psychological Association survey found that half of adults in the U.S. feel isolated or left out, downloads of AI companion apps hit 220 million, up 88% in a single year.
The technology sector’s answer to this loneliness crisis has, in other words, been more technology – and the results are not encouraging.
Research shows that heavy daily use of AI chatbots correlates with greater loneliness and reduced real-world socializing; AI can simulate companionship, but cannot produce belonging, for example.
Pet brands have become an unlikely proving ground for an alternate response: beyond building smarter apps, a cluster of startups are wiring real-world charitable action directly onto products themselves – a strategy increasingly visible across consumer categories. The bet: connection isn’t found in algorithms but in giving back.
Beyond a trend, a structural shift
This isn’t a corporate social responsibility or cause-<a href="https://bitcomme.com/is-wendys-wen-new-mcdonalds-bred-marketing-chief-rewriting-its-long-term-brand-playbook/” title=”Is Wendy's (WEN) New McDonald's-Bred Marketing Chief Rewriting Its Long-Term Brand Playbook?”>marketing story. Rather, it is about founders noticing that users around the world crave community beyond apps, and designing their products with offline charitable action as the load-bearing structure.
The conditions driving this transformation are well-documented: a 2025 Edelman report found that what consumers now want from brands is not value-signaling but economic hope, personal stability, and a genuine sense of community. Sixty-four percent already choose or avoid brands based on perceived values, and pairing clear social commitments with functional excellence lifts customer preference from 42% to 70%.
What’s changed is not the consumer appetite for purpose, it’s the urgency. The AI era has created a specific, widely-felt anxiety: digital life is accelerating faster than humans can adapt to, and the platforms promising connection are, in practice, delivering the opposite.
“As more of our lives become digital, people are placing even more value on experiences and products that feel real and personal,” said Kaleb Rush, co-founder of Saint Rocco’s Treats. The Pennsylvania-based pet treat company most recently organized an April event supporting the U.S. War Dogs Association and its Care Package Program for former K-9 dogs.
“There’s an appreciation for something that’s been made with care and intention, especially when it’s a member of the family,” added his brother and fellow Saint Rocco’s co-founder Kolby Rush.
The innovators building on this environment are thus not filling a niche, but responding to a gap that the dominant tech paradigm has created and cannot close on its own.
Giving back as product design
The mechanics these startups are deploying vary, but the underlying architecture is consistent: use a digital platform to organize a physical, charitable action; make the outcome verifiable; return proof of impact to the user.
Dosty, a digital pet care platform, launched Dosty Walks in June 2026, converting users’ daily step counts into food for shelter animals. Within weeks, it drew more than 1,600 users – with no paid communications, according to the founder.
“Just realizing that you walked today and it wasn’t useless,” Dosty founder Ayaz Ahmadov told The Sociable when asked about the community-level impact. “You donated your steps and did good – normal people would love to do that.”
Other brands have built giving directly into checkout. Oh Norman!, the pet-wellness brand founded by actress Kaley Cuoco, donates a portion of every purchase to dog rescues, and partnered with the Amanda Foundation, an NGO combating pet homelessness, for a shelter takeover in November 2025.
And across the Atlantic, UK-based raw dog food company James & Ella – founded by James Middleton, brother to the Princess of Wales – advocates for the Pets as Therapy (PAT) NGO and provides ongoing support to Battersea Dogs & Cats Home and Dogs Trust.
“From my own experiences I know what [pets] can bring to your life. If they could give someone else even one per cent of what they’ve given me, that will be a huge amount,” Middleton has shared of the impact his own dogs have had on his mental health.
For Saint Rocco’s, it means showing up in person: “If there is a moment where we can show up during the tough moments of a dog with cancer who won’t eat, or an adoption centre that can’t afford to spoil the dogs waiting for their forever homes, we show up,” noted Kaleb. “We don’t think of it as a donation; it is part of a community that’s all working together working toward the same goal.”
For this cohort of founders, the charitable mission isn’t a campaign that runs alongside the product – it is the product.
The operational reality
Running something in the physical world – coordinating partners, verifying outcomes, managing fraud, delivering proof of impact – is substantially more complex than shipping a software update.
Ahmadov spoke candidly about the friction Dosty Walks introduced that the core digital product never had: users tying phones to dogs to inflate step counts, customer complaints requiring human responses, logistics that his tech team had no experience managing.
“The surge of AI is actually causing people to feel more in need of tangible experiences,” he stressed, adding that collaboration with charities builds the trait most startups struggle to manufacture: empathy.
“There’s so many people I know who don’t have pets, but they volunteer, donate, etcetera. That empathy factor, especially in the period we’re living through, plays a huge role.”
The friction looks different by brand, but the dynamic holds. Online, people can read about Saint Rocco’s ingredients and 48-hour process; in person, they can see and smell the treats and watch their dog react to them. “We never want convenience to come at the expense of quality,” said Kolby.
Notably, it’s a harder model to fake. Psychologists at Penn State found genuine empathy is cognitively demanding enough that people avoid it when given the choice – and one in two consumers assumes the worst when brands are silent about their social commitments.
It’s a tightrope to walk, and also precisely why the companies that build it into their operations, instead of their messaging tend to be the ones that last. The operational burden, in other words, doubles as a credibility test.
What the data cannot tell us, yet
Whether this model produces a durable community remains an open question. Early growth numbers are striking, but growth and community aren’t the same thing. As with most businesses, the real test is retention: whether users stay, deepen their relationship with the product, and build the kind of reciprocal investment that constitutes community rather than a shared subscription.
People’s deepest social needs aren’t about having support available on demand, but about mattering to others – knowing that their actions are consequential, according to psychologist Clay Routledge; and a 2025 randomised MIT trial found only participants who engaged with human peers saw a significant drop in loneliness – those who interacted with chatbots fared no better than those who simply journaled alone.
The implication for product design is clear: consequence, not convenience, is what moves the needle. A product that demonstrates a real chain of causation is offering something purely digital experience structurally cannot.
Regardless, consumer trust in legacy institutions has declined across all regions, and consumers are increasingly likely to punish breaches and reward brands that demonstrably earn trust – even as regulatory scrutiny of AI’s social effects grows and loneliness data keeps worsening.
The bet is thus philosophical as much as strategic. The most resilient communities are not engineered through engagement mechanics, but earned through a shared act of doing something that needed doing; that in a world increasingly mediated by AI, realness is the whole point.
Featured image: Ramsés Cervantes
Disclosure: This article mentions a client of an Espacio portfolio company.
