Spawlight is a social-driven app that motivates users to take small yet meaningful actions for stray animals, inspired by our belief that "the longest journey begins with a single step." Adoption isn’t the only path—feeding, fundraising, and neutering efforts can all make a difference. Through a fun, supportive community, Spawlight helps ease concerns around expertise or commitment, providing AI-powered resources for guidance. Users can enjoy sharing updates, learning from others, and accessing tools that make helping strays both easy and deeply fulfilling.

2024-2025
Jinlin Wang - Design Lead
Ziwei Song - Product Designer
Han Sun - Servise Designer
Kunlin Zhao - Product Manager
Shujie LI - UXUI Designer
Figma
Adobe After Effect
Miro
Talkwalker

Problem statement

The current animal rescue model focuses heavily on promoting adoption, limiting the ways individuals can meaningfully assist stray animals. While many people want to help, they often feel powerless due to a lack of expertise and concerns about the responsibilities of adoption, leaving taking a stray to a shelter as their only perceived option. This places an overwhelming burden on shelters, making it difficult for them to provide adequate care and attention to all animals. This highlights a significant gap in the current approach to animal welfare, where the focus on adoption leaves a void between neglect and full adoption, depriving stray animals of opportunities for varying levels of care.

Opportunity statement

Our goal is to bridge the gap in stray animal support with an innovative platform that makes helping easy and accessible for everyone. Using AI-assisted tools, users can feed, identify injuries, and provide care under professional guidance, even without adopting. The platform creates a welcoming community where users can represent stray animals, share updates, fundraise, and connect with others. By enabling meaningful actions before, during, and after rescue, it ensures that anyone can contribute to improving the welfare of stray animals in a simple and fulfilling way. This holistic approach ensures that helping stray animals becomes an easy and fulfilling experience, empowering everyone to contribute to their welfare—whether through direct actions or by supporting broader efforts to improve their lives.

Market scale & Background

Stray animals are a major problem globally, with millions of stray dogs and cats suffering from malnutrition, disease, and poor living conditions. This not only affects animal welfare, but also creates public health risks, such as the spread of zoonotic diseases like rabies, and puts a great deal of economic pressure on shelters and community resources - implying that the worst-case scenario is that even shelters, can no longer afford to take on such a significant responsibility.

Safeguarding the well-being of stray animals, therefore, becomes a pressing issue to be considered and addressed by all those who wish to guard public health and create a city where people and animals can coexist in harmony.

Animal-Centric Posts

Capture the heartwarming moments of stray animals around you and record your helping hand, share them with a compassionate community of animal lovers who care about their well-being.

Each post highlights the specific needs of stray animals, using color-coded blocks to indicate their rescue urgency—green for general needs and orange for urgent assistance. Innovative interactive features allow users to track the animal’s journey, view its footprints, and contribute through donations or other meaningful actions..

Seamless Donation Experience

Encourage genuine and effortless donations by integrating opportunities naturally into user interactions. To build trust, the platform ensures transparency by providing receipts and invoices for every contribution. Whether supporting a specific animal or contributing to broader rescue efforts, the process is intuitive, trustworthy, and emotionally fulfilling.

AI-Powered Assistance

Spawlight’s AI system offers quick virtual vet checks, suggests the fastest care and rescue plans, and identifies the most suitable hospitals or shelters for immediate support. This ensures users feel confident and capable in helping stray animals. Additionally, this feature extends to everyday pet care, making it a versatile tool for pet owners seeking guidance for their household companions.

Milestone motivation

Celebrate users’ contributions with personalized achievements and certificates, marking milestones like animals rescued or funds donated. This mechanism fosters enthusiasm and long-term engagement, rewarding users for their compassion and dedication.