A home-grown pet travel technology company has been named pet start-up of the year amid growing local use and even its first airline partnerships.

Bermudian-founded PadsPass, a digital platform aimed at giving pet owners peace of mind when they travel with their four-legged companions. The app helps pet owners organise documents, vaccinations and deadlines they need to travel with a dog or cat, said subscription revenue was up by 68 per cent since May, while more than 1,200 pet owners and 80 veterinary practices were using the platform.

Bermuda has also become PadsPass’s largest market by website traffic.

Lauren Anders Brown, the company’s cofounder and chief executive, said: “The quieter milestone is that Bermuda is now our single-largest market by traffic. We built this here, and this is where it is used most.”

PadsPass received the accolade in the 2026 Pet Innovation Awards, an international programme that recognises companies, services and products across the pet care industry. Organisers said this year’s programme attracted thousands of nominations.

Users of the platform can upload veterinary records, which are reviewed and may be verified directly by their veterinary clinic. PadsPass then provides a checklist based on the animal’s destination, flight and travel date.

Ms Brown said the recognition showed that the wider industry is starting to recognise the practical problem the company tries to solve.

“Pet travel paperwork is not glamorous,” she said. “It is the thing that makes families cancel trips, or leave a pet behind. To have that recognised as innovation tells us the industry sees it too.”

The company has so far encoded pet travel rules for 54 jurisdictions, which are kept current by an accredited pet travel team. A patent application is pending for the system.

Ms Brown said: “We did not build another convenience app. We built the boring layer underneath, the thing everyone actually needed: pet parents, airlines, veterinarians and governments.”

PadsPass launched coverage for Britain and Europe in May and has begun working with its first airline partners. It has also entered a partnership with US-based Figo Pet Insurance.

Ms Brown said those relationships would allow PadsPass to reach customers when they book travel, rather than shortly before departure when paperwork problems may be harder to correct.

The company plans to launch a Trip Pass later this year, where a pet’s travel readiness can be scanned at an airline counter.

Ms Brown said several island governments had also begun discussions with PadsPass about digitising their pet travel systems.

“Everything arrives by air or sea, biosecurity matters more, and the paperwork has to be right the first time because there is no driving back,” she said.

“If we can make this work across the islands, it will work anywhere.”

Ms Brown began developing PadsPass after she and her dog, Paddington, were separated for 24 hours at Heathrow Airport because he had been given the wrong deworming treatment.

The company later joined Ignite Bermuda’s business accelerator and tested its prototype for about three years before launching the app in 2025.

PadsPass has also established a free central microchip registry for dogs and cats in Bermuda. Ms Brown, who sits on the board of the Bermuda SPCA, said the island’s veterinarians, officials and business community have been supportive.

“We could have built this anywhere,” she said. “We built it here because the island backs people who are trying something, and because Bermuda takes digital seriously as a matter of national ambition, not as a buzzword.”