Two weeks ago, DogVacay CEO Aaron Hirschhorn said that he thought his dog-sitting startup was an order of magnitude larger than its close competitor, Seattle-based Rover.com. It seems he may have spoken too soon.
Rover announced today that its revenue has increased by 575 percent year-over-year, blowing past DogVacay’s 200 percent jump. While Rover won’t release exact numbers, a representative for the company said that it pulls in “seven figures” every month, compared to six figures in the same period last year. That increase in revenue is driven both by a bumper crop of new bookings as well as new customers choosing to repeatedly use Rover’s service.
“More and more people are relying on Rover as their trusted source to book an in-home care provider,” Rover CEO Aaron Easterly said in a press release. “While we continue to see a sharp increase in bookings from new members, every major aspect of the business continues to improve.
In addition, the company said that it has more than 25,000 dog-sitters in over 9,000 cities across the U.S., and has facilitated more than 500,000 nights of pet boarding. For its part, DogVacay also said it recently served its 500,000th night of dog boarding, but only sports 15,000 hosts in 3,000 cities.
In some cases, it’s hard to draw an apples-to-apples comparison. Neither company has released actual revenue figures, so it’s hard to say if Rover has a lead in that regard and how close any disparity happens to be. The two companies seem fairly close in terms of the number of nights that users have booked using their services, but it’s also possible that one may have an edge over the other.
What is clear is that both companies have a lot of fight left in them. Rover raised a $12 million round of funding led by Menlo Ventures earlier this year, while DogVacay raised $15 million last year. Both companies have raised more than $20 million in total.
