A pet-product company built on a simple thesis: stop fighting the pet.
Planet Pounce is a two-product company from West Michigan. Both products solve a real, unloved problem in the $147B+ global pet category by working with animal instinct instead of against it. One is a plush toy designed to be gutted. The other is a patent-protected autonomous hunt system for cats.
Three things the category gets wrong.
Plush toys are designed to fail.
Dogs destroy them in minutes. Owners pick cotton out of the rug. Product gets thrown out. The category is built on planned-obsolescence frustration.
The cat-toy aisle ignores the actual problem.
Cats are crepuscular. They want to hunt at 5:30 AM. Current products are passive (laser pointers humans hold) or annoying (auto-toys that run on a single timer all day). None complete the prey cycle — stalk, chase, catch, kill.
The whole category treats pets as the obstacle.
Calming sprays. Anti-bark collars. Toys built to survive instinct. The framing itself is broken — and the brands that flip it (BarkBox, Fi, Wild One) get rewarded handsomely.
Pets are partners, not problems. Design for the partnership.
Both products solve a mutual need. Dogs get satisfying destruction and humans get easy cleanup. Cats get a complete hunt at 5:30 AM and humans sleep in. That symmetry is the brand.
"We don't fight instinct. We design for it."Two products. One thesis. Two business models.
Gutty Buddy
The first dog toy designed for destruction. A plush squirrel hides four high-quality organ toys. A hidden fastener flap lets owners reset and reuse — and creates a recurring revenue line via replacement organ packs.
Why it wins: a viral, photographable mechanic that solves a daily owner frustration, with a built-in razor-and-blade refill model.
Prowl
An autonomous multi-node hunt system. Speaker and burrow nodes stage a believable prey animal moving through the home — a behavioral state machine (hide, freeze, creep, burst, wounded) that completes the cat's kill cycle, on schedule, with no human awake. Randomized every run so cats never habituate.
Why it wins: first-mover in scheduled prey-cycle completion, protected by filed IP — built to prove the category, then license to established pet-hardware players.
Filed, not "patent pending someday."
U.S. provisional patent — filed May 2026.
Autonomous Behavioral Enrichment System for Domestic Cats. 17 claims, 5 independent. What's covered:
- Behavioral state machine driving prey movement (hide → freeze → creep → burst → wounded)
- Kill-item delivery — the cat gets to finish the hunt with a physical catch
- Multi-node networks with cross-node chaining (the prey "moves" room to room)
- Under-furniture node geometry, remote vocalization node, scheduling independent of Wi-Fi
- Human-conducted session mode — the phone as a live instrument
And the moat is still growing.
Further filings are in preparation, and a non-provisional utility conversion is budgeted and scheduled with counsel inside this round.
Beyond IP: the hardware body is deliberately open — bamboo, standard servos, grocery-store replaceable parts — while the firmware, app, and sequence intelligence stay proprietary. Open body, proprietary brain. Cheap to make, hard to copy where it counts.
Institutional tailwind: the AVMA's November 2025 position statement formally recognizes that indoor cats need enrichment for their health — the exact behavior-first case Prowl is built on.
Four reasons this works.
Two shots, one brand.
A plush product (low CAPEX, fast iteration) and a hardware platform (defensible, licensable) under a single voice. De-risks the bet — one wins big, both win bigger.
A category that rewards weird.
The pet sector is post-functional. Owners pay premium for products that feel like the brand actually likes their animal. We do.
Recurring revenue baked in.
Replacement organ packs for the squirrel; licensing royalties, sequence libraries, and node expansion for Prowl. Both products keep earning after unit one.
Founder-pet authenticity.
Built by a real owner of a real destructive dog (Zara) and a real 6am cat (Artemis). Every prototype passes or fails in a real living room before it goes anywhere.
The rescue mission and the product are the same thing.
24% of cat shelter surrenders are behavioral. The 6am meowing, the scratched doors, the "aggression" — these are unfinished hunt cycles, and they are exactly what Prowl is built to complete. A cat that hunts is a cat that stays.
For every commercial unit sold, a unit goes to a shelter or rescue. This is wired into the model, not a marketing campaign — because a returned cat is the failure case we started this company to prevent.
The raise.
Pre-seed. The smallest cheque that gets Gutty Buddy to a first manufactured run, the Prowl node family to licensing-demo quality, and the patent stack converted — certified, photographed, and in front of both customers and licensees.
Open to angels, seed funds, strategic CPG and pet-industry capital, and crowdfunding partners. SAFE preferred.
The next 12 months.
Close pre-seed
$300K SAFE. Lock plush manufacturer. Complete the Prowl burrow-node prototype and capture licensing demo footage.
Tooling & engineering validation
Gutty Buddy sample tooling. Prowl engineering validation across the node family. Engage patent counsel for the non-provisional draft. First rescue-partner pilot.
Batch 001 ships · licensing opens
First Gutty Buddy production run to the waitlist. Open licensing conversations with established pet-hardware players. Launch consumer site + press.
Convert the patent · follow-on
Non-provisional utility filed ahead of the May 2027 deadline. Indie pet retail + crowdfunding follow-on. Rescue program goes 1:1 with first commercial units.
One founder. Two pets. Skin in the game.
Josh Hamman · Founder
Josh is a West-Michigan-based product builder running Planet Pounce out of need. His dog Zara destroys plush toys; his cat Artemis is up at 6am demanding a hunt. Every Planet Pounce product starts as a real frustration in his living room and ends as something both pet and human are happy with.
Every prototype ships past the toughest QA department in the industry: a cat with complete indifference to sunk costs. Hiring plan once the round closes: hardware contractor + part-time ops.