Our story
ZEEberton is a live map for pet owners, built by one person. It took six years, one borrowed chihuahua and one very good piece of advice to get here.
It was around 2020. I was 25, living in Tehran, working as a network engineer. I had no pets, but I badly wanted a dog — and my mother did not want one in the house, for cleanliness reasons. I adopted a chihuahua anyway. I had her for ten days before I had to give her back to the family she came from.
I couldn’t have a pet, but I wanted somehow to be connected to the happy world of pets!
Around that time I kept turning over the same daydream: what if my workplace had a kindergarten for pets? You bring your dog in the morning, someone looks after them while you work, you take them home at night. I wanted to build that — a pet kindergarten working directly with companies, caring for animals while their people were at their desks.
It was not possible. I had no capital. I come from a middle-class family, and this was a business that needed a building and a payroll before it needed anything else. So the idea stayed where ideas stay.
Then I met Mohsen Noroozloo. He started as a sales consultant, became my business consultant, and ended up a genuine friend — in truth, my mentor. A real businessman with a good heart.
I went to him and said I wanted my own business, and that I wanted to be a CEO before I turned 30. I pitched him the kindergarten, and a pet shop as a fallback. He gave me something much better than either.
Hirad, you’re a tech guy. Build a forum. Invite pet owners in and let them ask and answer each other. The traffic turns that forum into a database of pet owners — and pet businesses will want to be there, because it is full of exactly the customers they are looking for.
After that first session with Mohsen I started dreaming again, and the idea grew past what he had described. Not a forum — a social network, where pet owners could genuinely connect with one another. Something with real value in it, not a trap built to extract money from people who love their animals.
Mohsen and I spent close to a year on it. We wrote a proper business plan. I designed the app you are reading about on Microsoft Whiteboard, screen by screen. There are differences now, of course — but the core of what ZEEberton does today came off those boards.
And I still could not build it. ZEEberton was no longer a forum, it was all of this, and I did not have the money — or, honestly, the skills or the tools. It ended up as a modest online pet store, and I left it there.
In 2021 I left Iran for Georgia and stayed five years. ZEEberton slept. I opened it up a few times over those years and closed it again; the motivation was never there.
Then in May 2026 it finally landed on me that ZEEberton is my calling. This time I have worked on it properly, every day, with everything I have. And here we are — a live map with real pet owners on it, in six languages, built and run by one person from Yerevan.
ZEEberton is the child I’m proud of.
Honestly? Because finding a free .com domain is hard. Whatever name I picked had to have a domain still standing behind it, and that ruled out most of what I liked. So I went looking for a word instead — and found ZEE.
In Dehkhoda’s dictionary, the great reference work of the Persian language, zee means life. Breath. Spirit. A living creature. A name for a network of animals and the people who love them could not have landed much better, and I did not have to invent a single part of it.
That is our tagline, and it carries three meanings at once. All three are the reason this exists.
Love your pets, in every kind of love there is — they deserve it. These animals gave our days movement simply by being next to us. Love comes in as many colours as there are ways to give it, so let’s colour their lives the way they have coloured ours.
A pet is the flow in an ordinary day. In a world where most of us are buried in our own heads, and where peace, friendship, love and affection have quietly faded out of daily life, an animal hands all of it straight back to you.
Love homeless animals too. The earth is not only ours, and being human means very little without the other creatures on it. Ours or nobody’s, they are part of this world and they are our responsibility. If we needed help, they would not hesitate.
Our mission is to connect pets and their owners to one another. Our vision is a comprehensive, reliable network among pet owners, everywhere. Our values are the rights of animals, and the physical and psychological safety of every pet and every member on the map.
And to say it plainly, because people always ask: ZEEberton is not a dating app. It is for friendship between pet owners — walks, playdates, packs, and a neighbourhood that turns out when someone’s pet goes missing. That boundary shaped a great deal of how the app is built. You can read the rest in our frequently asked questions.
Happy to hear from you — about the app, the story, or anything pets.
ZEEberton is free, and the map only gets good when the people on it are real. Be one of them.
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