Jacob Zuppke: CEO of Whisker

Episode 789

On today’s episode, we welcome Jacob Zuppke, CEO of Whisker — the company behind Litter-Robot, one of the most iconic and trusted products in modern pet care.
Under Jacob’s leadership, Whisker has grown into a multi-hundred-million-dollar consumer technology company, surpassing $1 billion in revenue over the past four years—all without raising a single dollar of venture capital. What began as a niche solution for cat owners has evolved into a category-defining brand built on product obsession, deep customer insight, and a relentless focus on design, performance, and autonomy.
In this episode, Jacob shares how Whisker transformed convenience into connected care, why data and design are shaping the future of intelligent pet care, and what it takes to build a true consumer love brand outside Silicon Valley. We also dive into scaling DTC alongside retail, leading without VC pressure, and how Whisker’s newest generation of products is moving beyond cleaning into personalized, proactive pet health. This conversation is packed with insights for founders, operators, and anyone building enduring consumer brands.

Resources from
this episode:

Transcript

Kara Goldin 0:00
I am unwilling to give up, that I will start over from scratch as many times as it takes to get where I want to be. I want to be you. Just want to make sure you will get knocked down. But just make sure you don’t get knocked out, knocked out. So your only choice should be go focus on what you can control. Control, control. Hi everyone, and welcome to the Kara Goldin show. Join me each week for inspiring conversations with some of the world’s greatest leaders. We’ll talk with founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs and really, some of the most interesting people of our time. Can’t wait to get started. Let’s go. Let’s go. This episode of the Kara Goldin show is brought to you by LinkedIn. Jobs. When you’re building a business, every hire matters. The right people in the right roles can change the trajectory of your company, and as you look ahead to 2026 whether you’re expanding your team or being more strategic about growth hiring with intention is essential. That’s where LinkedIn jobs comes in. LinkedIn jobs AI assistant helps you find qualified candidates faster and with more confidence. So you’re not just filling roles, you’re building a team that lasts. In fact, LinkedIn hires are 30% more likely to stay at least a year compared to the leading competitor. That kind of retention has real impact, and finding the right hire doesn’t have to feel overwhelming with LinkedIn jobs. Ai assistant, you can skip the guesswork and jargon. It filters candidates based on your roles, specific criteria and highlights top matches, so you’re not wasting time digging through endless resumes. When you’re running a business, you need a hiring process that’s fast and focused. Linkedin’s ai assistant delivers 25 strong candidate suggestions each day, giving you the chance to invite the right people to apply and keep the process moving. It’s a smarter, faster way to hire, and it’s why I rely on LinkedIn jobs. Hire right the first time, post your job for free at linkedin.com/kara Goldin then promote it to use LinkedIn jobs, new AI assistant, making it easier and faster to find top candidates that’s linkedin.com/kara Goldin to post your job for free, Terms and Conditions apply. Hi everyone and welcome back to the Kara Goldin show. Super, super excited to welcome back a returning guest who’s redefining what modern pet care, cat care, in particular, looks like at scale. So Jacob zupkey, who is the CEO of Whisker the maker of litter robot, they actually rebranded the company as well. I can’t wait to hear a lot more from Jacob on all of that. But if you’re not familiar with the little robots and Whisker, here’s the headline. This is one of the most successful consumer tech brands built outside of Silicon Valley. Over the last four years alone, Whisker has generated more than a billion dollars in revenue, built a fiercely loyal customer base, and done it all without raising dollars of venture money or private equity. And now Jacob and his team are entering their most ambitious chapter yet, launching a new generation of products that move beyond convenience into fully connected, personalized pet care. I cannot wait to hear all about that. I got a sneak peek of the product, so I will. I will not let you in on it yet, but very excited to have Jake appear to share all of this with all of us. So thank you so much Jacob for joining us.

Jacob Zuppke 4:06
Well, thank you for having me again. I appreciate it, and I look forward to chatting with you today. Awesome.

Kara Goldin 4:12
And I was sharing with Jacob that we don’t typically have returning guests on but I really, really loved so much of what he was talking about, because I know there’s so many things that are that, as business leaders, you’re thinking about, should I? Shouldn’t I? So his first episode that he did with us a few 100 episodes ago. It was, was really incredible, and I encourage you to go back and listen to it as well. But Jacob, let’s start at the top for listeners who may be new to litter robot and and now Whisker today, what problem are you fundamentally solving for pet parents or cat parents? In particular.

Jacob Zuppke 5:01
Well, thanks for asking. First and foremost, we are problem solvers for cat people. So the number one chore for you know, any cat household is the litter box. And 25 years ago, we invented litter robot and automated the litter box. And over the last 25 years, we brought to market litter robot, 123, and four, and then in 2025, just, you know, 60 or so days ago, we launched a little robot five, little robot five Pro and the little robot EVO, all really designed to automate the litter box, but now it’s really a focus on health insights. So as we think about the future of cat health. Unlike when my dog isn’t feeling well, or if I forget to feed her, or whatever it is, she sends these like polite reminders, like she will stand by her food bowl, or she will, you know, keep begging until I give her what she wants. My cat will hide if she’s not feeling well. And in 2019 it kind of hit home for me when the litter robot app, then, designed more for utility, sent me all these notifications in a row that my cat had gotten in and out, in and out, in and out, and we rushed short of the vet because it just seemed very odd to be using the litter box that often, and she had a full blockage in her urinary tract. And what we found over the last six years, and really our focus and where we’re taking the business, is that the litter box is often indicative of cat health issues, and so we have a unique ability to understand that at scale, across now millions of devices on what’s happening with your cat’s health, and so we’re now delivering solutions through the form of Smarter notifications, smarter insights on how you can help understand what’s going on with your cat, both in how much they weigh. So we now track weight in their deposits number one versus number two, we can now discern which is which, and then usage frequency, time of day, habits, and so we’re able to understand a lot more about your cap today than we ever were before. And that’s a big part of what we’re taking Whisker well beyond just the litter box as well into food and water

Kara Goldin 7:21
this episode of The Kara Goldin show is brought to you by LinkedIn. Jobs. When you’re building a business, every hire matters. The right people in the right roles can change the trajectory of your company, and as you look ahead to 2026 whether you’re expanding your team or being more strategic about growth, hiring with intention is essential. That’s where LinkedIn jobs comes in. LinkedIn jobs, AI assistant helps you find qualified candidates faster and with more confidence. So you’re not just filling roles, you’re building a team that lasts. In fact, LinkedIn hires are 30% more likely to stay at least a year compared to the leading competitor. That kind of retention has real impact, and finding the right hire doesn’t have to feel overwhelming with LinkedIn jobs AI assistant, you can skip the guesswork and jargon. It filters candidates based on your roles specific criteria and highlights top matches, so you’re not wasting time digging through endless resumes. When you’re running a business, you need a hiring process that’s fast and focused. Linkedin’s ai assistant delivers 25 strong candidate suggestions each day, giving you the chance to invite the right people to apply and keep the process moving. It’s a smarter, faster way to hire, and it’s why I rely on LinkedIn jobs. Hire right the first time, post your job for free at linkedin.com/kara Goldin then promote it to use LinkedIn jobs, new AI assistant, making it easier and faster to find top candidates. That’s linkedin.com/kara Goldin to post your job for free, Terms and Conditions apply so litter robot has become almost synonymous with with the category you own. The category. What do you think made it break through when so many pet products never do? A lot

Jacob Zuppke 9:30
of product. People say product, and I’m gonna say product, but I’m also gonna say product with great marketing. And so when I was I joined the company 11 years ago, next month, and when I joined, you had a much smaller version of where we are today. We were 25 people. We were seven figures in revenue, and you had great product at the litter robot two, I got to join around the time of launching litter robot three, and I also got to join the time in 2015 18, where influencer wasn’t yet a word, and I got to really reshape how we went to market. And we were very early influencer adopters, and I was all in on the influencer in 2015 and I think that timing was very helpful there, but I got to launch the LR three, really all around influencer strategy, and we just accelerated very quickly back in 2015 16 and 17, and then we really got in the video, and got really good at it quickly. And our video storytelling through 2018, 1920, 21 and so on. We got really good at telling the story about problem solution in a way that the consumer quickly understood the value of a product that yesterday they didn’t know they needed, and tomorrow they couldn’t live without. And as we’ve gone into 2324 25 what we’re finding is that the interface for our product down with the app. People talk about how they don’t want to scoop, but then once they stop scooping, they realize the insights they’re getting from our app are something that they’ve never had before, how much their cat weighs, how often they’re going in, tracking the habits in a way that you might track a baby. You know, when you have a baby and you’re going through those diaper phases, you’re as a parent, you’re usually tracking their output. And I think that when something doesn’t look right, you’re alarmed to it. And I think that our cats are really no different in that way, their their bathroom behaviors are often indicative of cat health. And we now have an opportunity to help, proactively and reactively, help a consumer understand what’s happening with their cat’s health?

Kara Goldin 11:42
So you are not the founder. You came in and if I recall you came in really to launch the direct to consumer side of the business, correct? And you’ve grown into the CEO role. So did you ever think that you would be the CEO of a cat focused company?

Jacob Zuppke 12:11
Um, well, when I first joined, I had never had a cat before, and so my now wife, then recently started dating girlfriend, she had a cat and Lexi, who is still with us today, and is the cat that I referenced just a couple minutes ago. I inherited Lexi, and it was wonderful. Having never lived with a cat before, I would say the answer to your question would have been no 11 years ago, as I really fell in love with the opportunity, the opportunity to tell a story, the opportunity to build the best product. And then became a cat person, started to warm up to the idea. And I remember a dinner 10 and a half years ago with the founder, where I told him that I was going to be to lead a billion dollar company, and he thought at the time I was crazy, and we were, you know, seven figures, maybe had just hit like 10 or 12 million at that time, so we’re just kind of growing out of that single seven figures. And he was like, yeah, that you’re talking crazy land. And we’re, we’re on our way. We’re doing it. And so fortunately, the evolution of the business of the last 10 years, it felt natural. And as my role evolved into more responsibility, I started to really lead the team, build the team, and shape. You know, the evolution evolved vision that we now have, and so it started to feel a lot more real over the last six, seven years. But no, 11 years ago, I could not have imagined being in this role in this company and having now almost 700 people on the team.

Kara Goldin 13:58
Wow, that’s incredible. You’re launching several new products at once. What does the litter robot five represent in the evolution of the brand,

Jacob Zuppke 14:11
in evolution of our engineering capabilities? I think is what it represents. The litter robot five is beautiful. I’m biased, but I’m not. It’s objectively beautiful. The it’s really it’s beautiful product design. So if you just think about the mechanical design a bit, it’s very highly functional, and we designed it to be functional first, and then wrap beautiful design around that, and those two together, when function form can go together. That’s to me, where beautiful design is really at its intersection. And so we did that with the little robot five. It was a chance to kind of stop and really think about what we wanted the future of the company to be. And given that we see this as an appliance in your home, beauty is an important part of how we decide which appliance to purchase, I would say. Secondly, is on the Health Insight side. We have so many new sensors in there, we have algorithms running to understand number one versus number two, which cat went when, based on its weight, a dual camera system with Edge compute for a AI recognition of which cat is doing what when to be able to map that back to which cat in the app so that you don’t have to do the work yourself. All of these are capabilities representative of our evolved engineering and product organization. So I think that’s, to me, one of the greatest representations of what we built is a isn’t a product development engine that can continually bring great products to market for the consumer.

Kara Goldin 15:44
I love it did. So when you I mean getting into the AI powered cameras and the facial recognition, I mean it’s, you know, it’s a bold move, right? Because you’re the core business is, is already successful, and now you’re getting into the technology side and bringing it in. It seems like a fun move, a natural move, but probably like kind of scary when, when you were launching it. And is it worth it? I mean, how do you how do you look at at that and decide, no, we got to go do this

Jacob Zuppke 16:31
fun question. I think if I look back in a couple of years, when we launched the litter robot for the scale, we started to see more people put cameras where their litter robot was, because now that they were tracking cat weight, they wanted to know which cat and our weight based ID algorithm was working well. It continued to improve, but the consumer wanted to see it as much as you can tell them it was this cat. They also wanted to visualize it. And so we started to see across all different platforms, Reddit, Instagram, everything videos from the lens of a ring camera or blink camera or some other version of a wise camera, and they would have it in their cat room looking at the little robot. So it felt natural, like a natural extension, to add a camera to the device to give the consumer what they were looking for, which was ultimately the visibility into what was happening with their little robot. So the camera felt natural, but just into a camera didn’t feel like our place, because it needed to be an intelligent camera. So we spent, you know, a year and hundreds of 1000s of cat videos, training to build a model that could actually see the cat face, and unlike maybe some basic machine learning pattern recognition, we did it around all the face coordinates, just like a maybe a phone would do a version of face recognition as well. We did that with a cat face, because I have two brown cats and two brown cats at night are very hard to see a pattern, like a white spot or something else, and so we’ve had to do it with the face, which is a much harder challenge, also really exciting.

Kara Goldin 18:11
So when you talk about multiple cats, I’m sure this is a question that everybody asks you, do you need to buy multiple systems, or can you have one and tell the cats to share the one?

Jacob Zuppke 18:30
So the beautiful thing about litter robot versus your standard n plus one rule, meaning cat litter box plus one. So for every cat you should have, in theory, two litter boxes. I’m sorry for every cat you should have one extra litter box. So three cats you should have four. The litter robot automatically cycles each time, so you really only need one. And with the litter robot five and its size capacity, we say that you could have up to five cats using it, because I have more more space in my home being in the suburbs and not in the city. I actually have two at home, but that’s choice. So we have our little robot Evo and our little robot five pro at home and but you know, I can bring one home as a tester. Most people, I tell them, buy one, and if you want another, buy another. Later. It’s free shipping, you know, on any robot. So I always recommend to a customer, buy one, unless you have more than five cats, or in the case of another model, four cats, you don’t need more than one. That’s your choice at that point. You also come into some territorial cats, and even in that the oftentimes that can be related to they don’t want to go and step on another cat’s poop to go poop. So we solve that.

Kara Goldin 19:52
So you have three distinct litter robot models with different price points. How? In. Intentional? Was that strategy and and how did you Why three versus versus two versus five?

Jacob Zuppke 20:11
So we believe in a world where in the future, nobody is scooping for two reasons. Nobody should have to scoop. I think it’s a chore that just has been accepted for, call it 70 years since uh, Ed low brought cat litter to the commercial market and started the market cat litter, um, and it really hasn’t evolved that much since then. It’s like cat poop corner. It’s acceptable to be in your living room cat people have gotten the stigma because of that. We believe in a future that’s different than that, and so in order to address a larger market, the best analogous product I could offer would be the iPhone. Se they have a more economy price point, but yet not cheap product offering that can appeal to a different consumer that wants to get into the Apple family. We believe in a future as well where people can get into the Whisker family at a more affordable price point, because we believe we’ve designed the right form factor and size for the cat. We can’t go too inexpensive, or we make it so small that it’s uncomfortable with a cat. That’s a line that we won’t I would say, step over. So we think that our 599 price point is a more approachable price point than we’ve been at before, and then ranging up to 899 for the best in innovation. So you have 599, 699-790-9899, now, giving us a variety of product where, if you’re an early adopter, you have cameras in there. You want to see everything and track every Health Insight. You go with an r5 pro if you just want to stop scooping, but also maybe weigh your cat. Go with an EVO, or even looked at a different way as we go international, form factor, size, height, we can now fit under a standard size table. We’ve never been able to do that before, so part of our EVO strategy was also accessibility to where you could put it.

Kara Goldin 22:14
So Whisker has incredible retention and word of mouth you have chosen to you, and I talked about this the last time you were on but you have your own direct to consumer site, plus, you use Amazon, you use tui, you’re you’re using all different channels to roll up the overall sales strategy. When you think about like retention and word of mouth, do you what do you obsess over to keep really these customers loyal? Year after year,

Jacob Zuppke 22:54
the Whisker app, as a consumer, we’re now interfacing with the app more than we are the device, because if we do the device right, and you have a two cat household, which is average in America, you’re only having to interface with your one litter robot maybe once a week. Add more cat litter, empty the drawer, your daily interface, hopefully multiple times a day if you want to check in on things or maybe look at your video camera of your tech on a bathroom, you’re interfacing through the Whisker app. So we now have almost 800,000 monthly active users of the Whisker app. We have over 150,005 star reviews of the Whisker app. That really is the reason why I would say people love the product, is we keep innovating. We deployed a app update with new features, new improvements every month. In 2025 it was 13 app updates that we did with new feature rich content for the consumer. We have a team of now over 50 software engineers working on our team full time to just continue innovating on the freemium and now also the premium version of the Whisker app, but the freemium is really everything that we were focused on last year continue delivering value to the consumer who already uses our product today. Just because you bought an LR for three years ago does not mean I should stop working on it. It means I should fast track my roadmap to keep delivering greater value on the product that you already own.

Kara Goldin 24:24
Definitely you’ve scaled the D to C business while also expanding in retail. What have you learned about balancing those two channels without hurting the brand?

Jacob Zuppke 24:42
Fun question. I think at DTC, we get to control the narrative in every step of the journey. So from the first time you engage with our website, what do you see? What do you feel to after post purchase? What is the journey to acclimate your cat? Right? That’s not for everybody. The same journey. Most cats acclimate quickly, but we give you a Best Practices Guide. And when we’re D to C, we’re able to do that now through retail. The luxury of having the Whisker app is that almost every user who purchases it, they use the Whisker app. So I now have a different ability to help you acclimate, to help you onboard. And then in retail, we’ve partnered with retailers that allow us to have an in store display to where we can help to tell our story in store. And now is really key for us to launch into retail in the first place, is to have the appropriate footprint for a litter robot to be on display, to give a sense of the premium plastics, we use the quality of the product, the integrity of the device, like we really wanted to tell a story going into retail, and I think that we’ve picked really great retail partners to help us do that. So that was really paramount to going from a straight DTC brand to being omnichannel, and we’ve continued to iterate along the way as well.

Kara Goldin 26:03
Looking back, what’s one counter intuitive decision that turned out to be just huge for Whisker or it could have been, obviously, you’ve rebranded, so it could have been at in the litter robot days, but just over your overall tenure with with the brand, what has been just a decision that turned out to be much bigger than you ever thought,

Jacob Zuppke 26:34
telling the consumer they’re a scooper, which had it had some pushback. I got some lovely letters from consumers that I offended them and that we frustrated them. And the girl, this was in 2019, and 2020 when we launched our Don’t be a scooper video, and we made the word scooper, kind of a mean word to call cat parents, and we poked some fun, but the reason we did it is to have a point of view. I think, as a marketer, we’re in a world right now where, over the last several years, it’s been hard to maybe take a point of view that could be contentious in any way. And I think when you call a cat person who’s been scooping forever a scooper, and make it a mean word, and build your whole creative all around scooping being this bad thing and how it’s broken, and you were doing the wrong thing for your cat. And there’s a better way. I remember the first time I showed it to our founder, and he was just his eyes just bulged out, and it was like, I can’t believe we’re gonna do this. And I think when you have a strong point of view, I think that you have to be willing to go after it, and especially in marketing, where, if you’re vanilla, you’re nothing to nobody. If you take a point of view and you tell an audience you are, who we want to talk to, there are going to be people who either feel left out or maybe feel, in this case, hurt or offended, or maybe they don’t like your creative but for us, we knew we had to take a bet to change the perception of what the litter box could and should be. For the consumer, I specifically remember the girl with the chocolate cake as she says, and you scoop the poop and She licks her finger. It was with your hand. And, I mean, we got a lot of letters from that of you ruined my dinner. I can’t believe you would say that. I can’t believe you would visualize it this way. And it worked, because all those people that sent me those letters, they probably told 20 people, and those 20 people said, I don’t really find that offensive. What is this product that’s awesome, and I think for all the people that didn’t write us letters, who ultimately came and made a purchase, a point of view is what we needed, and that was a jumping off point for how we transitioned our video strategy. And I would say everything we’ve done since then is because of a moment in time where we took took a bet. It was a good bet. It was we spent six figures on this piece of creative. We had never done that before. So it was a lot of bets at once, and I think it paid off, and it shaped how we build moving forward.

Kara Goldin 29:12
What do you think is is the biggest marketing direction that that marketing is going today that maybe you think is is undervalued. I mean, we’ve, you talked briefly about influencer strategy, and, you know, I think most many people today say that just sort of is not necessarily working anymore. There’s been a lot of changes to DTC. Algorithms are probably changing faster than ever. AI is definitely helping marketers, but also eliminating jobs at the at the same time. But how? Do you see marketing today? And maybe there’s some undervalued piece out there that you really think people need to pay more attention to.

Jacob Zuppke 30:10
If I heard this years ago, I might balk at my own statement in response to what you just asked, but I’m going to say authenticity. I think that in a world full of AI, we’re using only real cats. We’re using real photo shoots, real video shoots. People can sniff through fake so that shows up in a lot of ways. So in our content creation, we use all real cats. We have a studio in house. We rent houses all over. We work with influencers and creators everywhere to shoot real content. And when I look at some of our the brands are trying to compete with us right now. One of the things I often see is Photoshop their competing device in a room that a user would never put it the consumer is too discerning or too smart to not see right through that. And I think that when you’re trying to change behavior, in our case, around a life changing appliance, where it sits in a room, how it shows up in the home, how the cat’s interacting with it, we have, I don’t know how many hundreds of 1000s of videos and photos on the internet about the little robot being used in real homes. And you can’t fake that. You can’t AI your way into that in, you know, not have the consumer see that. But I think authenticity shows up to an influencer. So, you know, I would agree a lot of people are saying influencer has changed. If it’s not what it once, you know was, I think a lot of that’s rooted in a lack of authenticity. When you partner with an influencer that’s not actually using your product, but you just pay them a fee to do a thing their audience sees right through that. And having had kids over the last five years, and watching my wife and her shopping behaviors, she’s followed influencers that had kids right around the same time as us who, right off the bat, she indexes, oh, they had a girl. We had a girl. I’m gonna follow them and see what they buy, right there’s an authenticity to that we’re living similar lives, and my wife can follow and see what they’re doing, but I’ve watched her behavior shift when you can tell it’s just then paid promotions, where my wife stopped following some of these people, because she could just see right through the marketing of they’re now just willing to promote anything. And I remember there was one Creator that she really loved. They had two girls, like we had two girls, and that creator started take on brands that were so far outside of the price range of anything that this creator had promoted before, and it just went to inauthentic. And my wife stopped following that person and stopped following what they were purchasing. I think authenticity shows up in your creative. Shows up in your experience. It shows up in your emails. You know, it’s hard to fake authenticity. And theory on top there is, I’m still on Reddit as cat poop man, I still personally respond to every customer who I get a lot of customers every day that reach out to me. I’ve never had my assistant write an email in response to them. I do it all myself. It’s authentic, and maybe the consumer knows it, maybe they don’t, but I can tell you the community of people that appreciate that I’m in the conversation and listening, you cannot fake that authenticity.

Kara Goldin 33:32
Totally agree, Jacob. Thank you so much for coming back and joining us today, and what you all are doing at Whisker is, is super, super fun. I’m really excited about this next chapter. And love, love, love the new AI enabled products. And I think that you are not only interfacing better with the consumer, but also getting, just getting a lot smarter, helping the consumer get a lot smarter about their little fur friends. So the little the little robot five, five Pro Plus Whisker plus the pet tag, all of it. Everybody will have all the info in the show notes, but you need to get your hands on these so so good. So thank you again for coming back and thanks everyone for listening and until next time on the Kara Goldin show. Thank you for having me. Thanks so much. Thanks again for listening to the Kara Goldin show. If you would please give us a review and feel free to share this podcast with others who would benefit. And of course, feel free to subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode of our podcast. Just a reminder that I can be found on all platforms. At Kara Goldin, I would love to hear from you too. So feel free to DM me, and if you want to hear more about. My journey, I hope you will have a listen or pick up a copy of my Wall Street Journal, best selling book, undaunted, where I share more about my journey, including founding and building. Hint, we are here every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Thanks for listening and goodbye for now.

Click to subscribe:

Listen on Apple Podcasts
Listen OnApple Podcasts
Listen on Spotify
Listen OnSpotify
Listen on Overcast
Listen OnOvercast
Listen on PlayerFM
Listen OnPlayerFM

People Also Liked

799

Raj Alva: Co-Founder of Whiskey JYPSI

798

Kayse Gehret: Founder of Microdosing for Healing

797

Genevieve Dolan: Founder & CEO of Golden Child Beauty

796

Kristi Lord: Co-Founder of L’AVANT Collective

795

Alex Whitmore: Founder & CEO of Taza