DTC pet brands need real evidence.

The Problem

Pet supplements are an $8B aisle where TikTok endorsements, white-coat packaging, and the words vet-formulated do most of the selling. Almost none of it has real evidence behind it. The Federal Trade Commission is starting to enforce §255.3 against this category, the rule that requires real proof behind any expert claim, and the first fines are landing this year. PawConscious is the third-party layer that ties every claim to an actual study on PubMed and a named Boston vet on the panel, not a paid influencer.

What is PubMed? It is the US National Library of Medicine's database of peer-reviewed biomedical research, the gold standard for any real health claim. If a study is not in PubMed, it is not medically established.

Paste a product URL. A Subconscious TIM-Qwen3.6-27B agent calls the Natoma PubMed MCP live, grounds every PMID it cites, and returns three artifacts a brand can hand to the FTC, to a vet, and to a skeptical buyer.

How it works

Three beats, end to end.

The problem

Pet supplements sell on aesthetics, not evidence. The FTC is starting to enforce §255.3 against the category. Brands need a defensible trust layer.

Trigger

Paste the link of the product you want to review. A LangChain ReAct agent runs the same way from a CLI, a cron job, or an event hook.

Web interfaceCLI(soon)Scheduled job(soon)Event trigger(soon)

Watch it solve

TIM-Qwen3.6-27B reasons live, calls Natoma's PubMed MCP, grounds every citation in a real PMID, and returns a badge, an FTC §255.3 file, and five Boston vet invites.

Architecture

Trigger → Harness → LLM ⇄ Tools

Step 1

Trigger

POST /portal/api/validate

Web interface today, CLI and cron next.

Agent loop

Step 2

The Harness

LangChain · createAgent

ReAct: think, call, observe, repeat.

LLM API

Subconscious

TIM-Qwen3.6-27B

Reasoning + tool selection.

External Tools

Natoma MCP

pubmed · firecrawl

PubMed + Firecrawl live · Airtable, Gmail soon.

Step 3

The deliverables

badge · §255.3 file · 5 vet invites

§255.3 is the FTC rule that requires real proof behind any expert-style claim like 'vet formulated.' Every PMID inside traces back to a real PubMed paper the agent retrieved in this run, never an invented reference.

The harness prompts the language model, the model decides which tool to call, the harness runs that tool against Natoma and feeds the result back, and the loop repeats until the model emits a final answer. Every citation in that answer must trace back to a real paper the agent retrieved during the run, identified by its PMID, the unique eight-digit ID PubMed gives every indexed study, so nothing can be invented after the fact.

Omar and Maggie Dominguez, founders of PawConscious, with Trufa the French bulldog and Corcho the golden retriever

Why we built this

Built for them first.

This is Maggie, my wife, and our dogs Trufa and Corcho. Every time we shop for a supplement for the dogs we ask the same question: did a real veterinarian actually read the studies behind this, or is it just influencer marketing in a lab coat?

PawConscious is the trust layer we wished existed when we were the customers. Real third-party vet review, no paid endorsements, every claim tied to a published study any pet owner can look up themselves. The only way to win over a skeptical buyer is to actually be right.