THE INNOVATOR SHOWCASE
Jessica Schleder, Founder & CEO
ADOPTIMIZE
When you meet Jessica Schleder, founder and CEO of Adoptimize, she strikes you as a startup-savvy MBA grad and fervent animal adoption advocate.
Add Out-of-the-Box Thinker to that list of bona fides and you understand the full Schleder: she’s passionate about what emerging technology can do to save animals’ lives.
Like many rescue advocates, Jessica was frustrated with how shelter animals were being portrayed and marketed—if they indeed were being marketed at all. The shelters’ black-&-white kennel cards with images of frightened, newly-arrived animals weren’t compelling to adopters looking to bring home a new family pet.
Jessica Schleder
“I was volunteering at a municipal shelter in Los Angeles and I was—frankly—horrified by the images being used to market the pets. The poorly-lit, blurry images made it look like the shelter didn’t care at all—which is so far from the truth,” Jessica recalls.
Inspired by a machine learning course she took as an MBA candidate at USC, Jessica decided to apply advanced algorithms to images of shelter dogs to improve their intake photos. The web app she built uses a machine learning algorithm to automatically edit and optimize a pet’s image to maximize its chance at adoption. As Jessica says, “Adoptimize takes the shelter out of the shelter photo.”
“No more animal control officers manually taking photos with cameras from 2002! For shelters, these improved intake photos increase adoption and stray-reclaim rates, and shorten length-of-stay,” she explains. “This not only decreases shelter operating costs, it can eliminate the need to kill adoptable animals for space.”
Bogeyman, original image
Bogeyman, Adoptimized image
Like any tech entrepreneur, Jessica has the data to back up her assertions. In an alpha pilot at the shelter in Amarillo, Texas, Adoptimize was credited with
a 27% increase in direct adoptions,
a 68% increase in transfers out of the shelter, and
a 57% reduction in euthanasia.
A subsequent study in Palm Valley, Texas—the highest-kill shelter in the U.S. at the time—shows a 30% increase in adoption rates, and a 33% reduction in length of stay, accounting for an overall drop in euthanasia rates of 31%.
“Shelter managers who were previously too busy running their facilities to consider emerging technologies are starting to call us,” Jessica says.
The pandemic has also proven the value of tools like Adoptimize. With shelter resources stretched thin—and many shelters prohibiting visits by members of the public—accurate and polished photographs of shelter animals are more critical than ever to the goal of live release rates.
“COVID has just confirmed how Adoptimize can help shelter staff not only save lives, but streamline their operations because the process only takes 15 seconds. We’ve even seen shelters leverage volunteers remotely to use Adoptimize to improve their existing images. When you consider how many more animals can get seen, that’s a win-win-win!”
Adoptimize is shelter technology that automates great pet photos. Try it out for free.