Key Takeaways Rotman landed on the business idea that would become PrettyLitter while in an incubator program in 2015.
His pitch won in the program’s consumer-facing category competition, and Rotman received a $50,000 check.
Here’s how Rotman took PrettyLitter from a $1 million seed round to a major Mars acquisition — and what’s next.
This as-told-to story is based on a conversation with Daniel Rotman, founder and CEO of PrettyLitter, an innovative pet care brand that’s conservatively sold more than 50 million bags of litter to date, per the company. PrettyLitter started with just $1 million in seed funding and was acquired by Mars in under five years for a reported $500 million to $1 billion*. The piece has been edited for length and clarity.
Image Credit: Courtesy of PrettyLitter. Daniel Rotman.
The inspiration for starting my business, PrettyLitter, came from a real-world pain point: I’d lost my 15-year-old cat, and she had a rapid decline. She went from behaving normally to being lethargic all of a sudden. It was a really traumatic experience, and I learned from the vet that this is actually very common for cats — they’re built by nature to hide illness really well because they’re stoic and don’t want to feel vulnerable.
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A few years later, in 2015, I was participating in an incubator program where people were hacking out a business idea. I was at a point in my life where I’d finished graduate school and was going to go into public policy, but then I decided to pivot back into entrepreneurship. So, as everyone was thinking about ideas inspired by their lives, I recalled what I had gone through with my cat. I thought, What can I do to help cat owners not have to go through the trauma of seeing their cats rapidly decline?
“The lightbulb went off: the litter box.”
I remembered the vet explaining to me that urinary diagnostics were an important tool in understanding health problems in both cats and dogs, so I began to wonder if I could use their waste as a sort of alert system. The lightbulb went off: the litter box. It’s what we use every day as cat owners; we all hate it, but we have to have it. I wanted to turn the litter box into a health-monitoring tool.
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