Our story
An engineer, his two cats, and a bowl he couldn't verify
Growlrr began at a kitchen counter, not a boardroom. It was built by one person for two specific cats — and everything we make still carries the fingerprints of how it started: years spent watching wild animals eat, and a career spent making things precise enough to put inside a human heart.
Before Growlrr, our founder — Prasanna Muralidharan — spent four years, from 2014 to 2018, in the field, in wildlife conservation. He tracked free-ranging animals across some of the wildest corners of the region: elephants moving through the coffee estates of Coorg, tigers in Pench Tiger Reserve, ibex and snow leopard in the high cold desert of Spiti, orangutans in the forests of Batang Toru in Sumatra, and hornbills in Arunachal Pradesh.
You learn something in the field that no feeding chart teaches: how healthy animals actually eat, move, and hold condition when nobody is measuring them. Their food is never the same twice, yet they stay in remarkable shape. What holds steady isn't any single meal — it's a few underlying principles the varied diet keeps satisfying. Those years are where the idea we now call BARC — Biologically Appropriate, Residually Correctedquietly took shape: feed in a way that's biologically appropriate, and correct only the small residual gaps a home kitchen can't see.
His training pointed the other direction — toward precision. Prasanna is a mechanical engineer with a master's in computational mechanics from the University of Cincinnati, and he spent his working years doing cardiovascular stent R&D at Conor Medsystems in Menlo Park, California — a stent company Johnson & Johnson acquired for US$1.4 billion in 2006. That is the discipline of designing a tiny object to a tolerance, then proving it holds before it's ever trusted with a life. You don't hope a stent is right. You validate that it is.
Then he adopted two cats, and started cooking fresh for them — a genuine act of care, and a choice more and more Indian pet parents are making. But one part turned out to be genuinely hard: being sure the bowl was actually complete. Hitting the exact daily micronutrient targets — calcium, iodine, zinc, copper, the B-vitamins, taurine for cats — meal after meal, whatever cut of meat was fresh that day. He could cook the food. He couldn't verifyit. And the gap is real: when researchers evaluated 200 home-prepared pet-food recipes, the great majority fell short on at least one essential nutrient, in exactly the places a cook can't see.
So he did the only thing his two halves knew how to do — he treated it as an engineering problem. The field-biology instinct said: don't replace the fresh bowl, keep it. The medical-device instinct said: then build the correction to a tolerance, and validate it. That became Growlrr — and, at its heart, the Growlrr BowlBalancer: a single, purified, precisely-dosed 5 gram micronutrient sachet that lands the floor a fresh home bowl is missing.
Developed by
Growlrr was developed by its founder, Prasanna Muralidharan — a computational-mechanics engineer (Master's, University of Cincinnati) who did cardiovascular stent R&D at Conor Medsystems, the medical-device company Johnson & Johnson acquired for US$1.4 billion in 2006, and spent four years in field wildlife conservation — for his own two cats.
What that origin means for your pet
Growlrr's authority is engineering plus field biology plus a demanding owner — not a clinic and not a lab coat. We think that's the more useful combination. The field-biology half gives the standard its shape: a diet built around what keeps a healthy animal in condition — fresh, local, species-appropriate protein, a balanced mix of chicken, mutton, farmed fish like tilapia and egg (with curd and a little veg for dogs). The engineering half gives it its proof: the sachet is designed to a tolerance, then validated the way an engineer validates a design.
That's why every recipe is stress-tested across more than a million simulated bowls — accounting for the real day-to-day variation in grocery meat — against NRC 2006, the National Research Council's research standard for the nutrient requirements of dogs and cats. It's what lets you swap chicken for fish one day without recalculating anything. The two-part method has a name — the BARC protocol — and you can read exactly how we validate it.
We're based in Chennai and ship across India, and the sachet is made to nutraceutical standards at a leading WHO-GMP · HACCP · FSSAI · FDA-approved facility. We build for healthy dogs and cats at every life stage — not clinical cases — and we're clear about the line between adequate and ideal: a single-protein bowl can clear the floor, but the diverse, balanced bowl is the one we recommend and the one we designed for.
Build a bowl for your pet
Tell us your pet's species, weight and activity, and the recipe-builder returns a complete daily plan — grams of fresh food to buy, and the number of 5 g sachets to add.