Once upon a time… How Unboxed was born

It all started ten years ago with a gift for my wife — a cute Yorkshire Terrier (eventually it turned out that I’d bought it for myself :) At some point I realized that there was no online community for pet owners and, as I was leading a team of talented web developers, it was a no brainer to build a social network (at that time Facebook had just started to kick-off) where people could share photos, blog about their puppies and send virtual gifts. You should see how we celebrated when every 1,000th pet owner signed up to the network.

Unboxed is my 3rd child. In two ways: I already have two cowboys at home and this is my 3rd company.

As the network became bigger and bigger, people began to help each other by asking for and recommending pet related products. As a business guy I saw an opportunity to help them out… to cut a long story short — we built a marketplace that connected pet suppliers with pet owners, eventually becoming category leader, before we sold the company in 2014.

It was so clear to me that there was a way that you could build and help communities while making business at the same time. And when it came to our next big idea …

Silicon Valley came knocking at the door. The platinum rated US accelerator The Alchemist spotted our idea and invited us over to develop it. We had a unique opportunity in the US to learn from people who built products at Google, Twitter, Salesforce, Airbnb or taught at Stanford. Learning from the best of the best gave us greater vision and inspiration and we were ready to push Unboxed further.

We raised funds from 12 investors, made some mistakes along the way, learned a bunch of lessons and here we are today — a team of 15 crazy people building something we’re not only passionate about but truly believe in.

Tadas Deksnys
Founder of Unboxed