For far too long, feline health has been defined by late intervention.

Chronic conditions such as kidney disease, diabetes and osteoarthritis are common in cats, and yet diagnosis often happens only once disease is well advanced.

Calgary-based company Sylvester.ai is trying to change this.

“Cats aren’t healthier than dogs. We just see their problems later,” Sylvester.ai founder Susan Groeneveld told Feline Business Brief.

“When we started this company, it wasn't to start an AI company,” Groeneveld said.

”We started this company to solve a problem, which was the under-medicalisation of cats, and AI happened to be a very effective way to get an insight on the cat.”

The startup was inspired by Susan’s beloved farm cat Jack, who had become ill while masking his pain. Heartbreakingly, Jack died alone, an experience that spurred Groeneveld to found Sylvester.ai.

“Jack represents a failure. We watched him suffer and didn’t do enough. We didn't know,” Groeneveld said.

Sylvester.ai's app, Tably, can indicate how your cat is feeling by reading facial pain indicators based on five areas: ears, eyes, whiskers, muzzle and head position.

In addition to this direct-to-consumer approach, Sylvester.ai offers clinic integrations, which vets can use for remote monitoring, and white-labelled AI plugin for digital pet or vet platforms.

Sylvester’s goal is not diagnosis but behavioural signal detection. “We’re not diagnosing disease,” Groeneveld said. “We’re flagging that something has changed, and that it might be worth paying attention.”

These signals help nudge cat guardians to take their cats to the vet earlier than they otherwise would have. This translates to better preventive feline care.

Consumer demand appears strong: When Sylvester.ai first started, they saw 54,000 downloads in one week. Scaling among veterinary clinics is the current challenge, with uptake determined less by cat guardians than veterinarians.

Last May, a collaboration was announced between Sylvester.ai and CoVet, an AI-powered clinical copilot. Under the collaboration, Sylvester.ai’s techology will be embedded directly into CoVet, giving veterinarians feline pain readings both during appointments and after discharge.

Groeneveld's earlier work with animal health and pharmaceutical firms highlighted a structural issue: cats were not returning to veterinary clinics.

“They’d come once, and that was it,” she has said, noting that many euthanised cats had not been seen by a vet in the preceding year.

Part of the challenge is feline behaviour itself. Cats are experts at masking pain and discomfort.

In addition, the tendency to treat cats on a one-off basis each time leads to a dearth of health data that could otherwise be used preventatively.

“If you only see cats episodically, you miss the slow signals,” she said. “And if you miss the signals, you don’t build systems to act on them.”

That gap has consequences beyond individual care. Late diagnosis narrows treatment windows and reduces health outcomes.

‘We can tell you that 30% of our users are going to a vet,” Groeneveld said, citing data from the CATalyst Council. “Of the cats that are going 80% of those cats have been diagnosed with something medical.”

Like many feline-forward innovators, Groeneveld is looking to close that gap.

“I believe knowledge is power, and that this technology can help people do right by the animals they love,” she said.

Sylvester.ai is not alone in trying to read feline expressions.

“There’s more willingness to think about prevention in cats now,” Groeneveld said during our interview, pointing to growing awareness of chronic disease, expanding feline-specific drug pipelines, and changing cat guardian expectations around health monitoring.

A small but growing cluster of startups is applying computer vision, machine learning, and behavioural analytics to other animals.

The Feline Business Monitor, our new quarterly market intelligence report, analyses these and other commercial signals shaping the global feline economy. Find out more here.