Caval is the solution to an industry that was left behind.

In the fall of 2024, I boarded my golden retriever Harvey at a facility in Manhattan while I traveled for a weekend. When I picked him up, he was listless. Within twenty-four hours he was in an emergency veterinary hospital, diagnosed with aspiration pneumonia he had almost certainly contracted at the boarding facility. He spent five days in intensive care. I spent those days beside him, running up roughly twenty-five thousand dollars in veterinary bills and asking the facility, repeatedly, to file a claim with their insurance. They refused. Their carrier declined to investigate. Harvey survived. The experience did not leave me.

Over the following months I set out to understand why the system worked the way it did. What I found was an industry built, almost intentionally, to disadvantage the people it should serve most. Commercial insurance policies for pet care businesses are written to protect facilities from liability claims, not to make pet owners whole when things go wrong. Facilities have every financial incentive to hide incidents rather than report them. The small group of specialty providers dominating the category have not meaningfully modernized their product in over a decade. And pet owners, when something happens, are left with no direct recourse.

Caval is what it looks like to address this. We start as a broker placing better-considered coverage for pet care businesses across New York. We are building toward our own insurance product, launching in 2028, whose signature feature is a promise to every pet owner that if something goes wrong at a facility covered by Caval, they are made whole. Directly. In writing. As a term of the policy.

Caval is named for Harvey.