Rover: $8.1 Million PPP Loan Repaid at the Listing

Category: pet-care marketplace
Pandemic-layoff role: Deepest-cut ranking company
Last updated: 2026-11-01

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Article: How 41 Companies Handled Pandemic Layoffs

Founders, executives and investors

Rover was founded in 2011 and is based in Seattle. Aaron Easterly, a co-founder, was chief executive in 2021 and when the sale to Blackstone closed in 2024; Tracy Knox was chief financial officer in 2021. Rover's 2021 results were issued in the name of A Place for Rover, Inc.

On February 10, 2021 Rover agreed to merge with Nebula Caravel Acquisition Corp., a special purpose acquisition company sponsored by the San Francisco private equity firm True Wind Capital. The deal valued Rover at an enterprise value of about $1.35 billion. The listed company, Rover Group, Inc., traded on Nasdaq until the Blackstone sale.

Business before the pandemic

Rover connects pet owners with sitters, walkers and other providers who offer overnight services, such as boarding and in-home sitting, and daytime services, such as doggy daycare, dog walking, drop-in visits and grooming. In 2021 it said more than 500,000 providers across North America and Europe used the platform. Its prospectus put the dependence plainly: demand "is primarily linked to pet parents traveling or working outside of the home."

What the pandemic did to the business

Stay-at-home orders removed both reasons to hire a sitter. Rover's bookings fell 43 percent in 2020 and the average booking was worth 7 percent less, the prospectus says, and revenue fell 49 percent. Marketing spending dropped to $16.3 million from $49.9 million after Rover turned off "substantially all paid acquisition marketing activities" in March 2020. It also shut down its on-demand service, accelerating $2.6 million of amortization on the software behind it. The operating loss barely moved: $53.0 million in 2020, against $53.7 million in 2019.

Recovery came with the vaccines. First-quarter 2021 revenue was still down, at $12.2 million against $17.0 million a year earlier, but "in the first quarter and continuing into May, we have seen an uptick in both Gross Bookings Value (GBV) and bookings as COVID vaccines roll out," Easterly said. The last week of March 2021 was Rover's busiest week for new bookings since the week before Christmas 2019. Puppies made up 38 percent more of new pet profiles than in the first quarter of 2019, and a Rover survey published in January 2021 found that 49 percent of Americans said they had got a new dog during the pandemic. The results release called the "pandemic puppy" boom "a real phenomenon."

In the second quarter of 2021 revenue was $24.5 million, up 355 percent from the lockdown quarter a year earlier, and Rover reported its first quarterly profit on an adjusted EBITDA basis, $2.5 million.

Pandemic-relief role: a PPP loan repaid at the listing

SBA approved Rover's PPP loan of $8,123,540 on April 15, 2020, reporting 220 jobs. The record names the borrower "A Place for Rover/Rover," at a Seattle office address, and reports the whole amount as payroll, about $36,900 for each job reported; Silicon Valley Bridge Bank is listed as the originating lender. The record gives the business type as "Sole Proprietorship."

The prospectus describes the same loan as an April 2020 promissory note with SVB for $8.1 million, at 1 percent over two years. To get it, Rover certified that "current economic uncertainty" made the loan "necessary," and the filing said that certification "did not contain any objective criteria and is subject to interpretation." Rover repaid the principal and accrued interest when the merger closed on July 30, 2021. SBA lists the loan as paid in full on August 21, 2021 and records no forgiveness.

Layoffs

In the spring of 2020 Rover cut about 40 percent of its employees and moved about 10 percent more to standby or furlough, its prospectus says, and "significantly reduced" its support and technology staff. How Rover handled layoffs →

Under Blackstone

The sale to funds affiliated with Blackstone was announced on November 29, 2023, and Rover stockholders approved it on February 22, 2024. The deal closed on February 27, 2024: stockholders received $11.00 in cash per share, and Rover's stock stopped trading and was delisted from Nasdaq. "The closing of this transaction is an important milestone in Rover's history and marks the start of the next chapter in our story," Easterly said in the release.

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