The Founder Files with Paloma Newton: Why "More Good Years Together" Begins Long Before Your Dog Gets Sick
Welcome to The Founder Files, an inside look at the women building the next generation of category-defining companies. These conversations capture founders in moments of becoming. No polished retrospective or glossy highlights reel. This is where we catch ambitious women in motion: when the decisions are still hard, the outcomes still uncertain, and the lessons are still fresh enough to actually be useful.
Paloma Newton is a commercial operator turned biotech startup co-founder. She’ll be the first to tell you she has no formal science background, but that’s arguably what gives Elita its competitive edge.
Elita is the world’s first pet longevity platform, built on the belief that dogs deserve more than a trip to the vet when something goes wrong. It’s ambitious and technically complex, brought to life by someone whose self-proclaimed superpower is asking “dumb questions” (the kind that force a whole team of scientists to make their work legible to the people it's designed to help).
In this conversation, Paloma shares how Elita evolved from a stem cell bank into something much larger, why people decisions always prove to be the hardest, and the leadership lesson she had to learn the hard way: that your job as a founder isn't to be the smartest person in the room, it's to be the clearest.
Q. Tell us about Elita in your own words. What are you building, and why does it need to exist?
“Elita is a pet longevity platform. We're starting with dogs.
“Most pet health is reactive. Owners notice something's off, the vet runs tests, often when it's already too late. Dogs can't tell us what hurts. By the time symptoms show up, you've usually lost years you didn't have to.” — Paloma Newton
We combine biological data, clinical history, and what owners observe day to day, and turn it into earlier risk detection and preventative care. Think Function Health, but for pets. The current pet health stack treats dogs like patients who only exist when they're sick. That's a broken model. The biology is there, the data is there. Nobody's actually building the product that uses it. We are. Because dogs don't get a second life, and the people who love them deserve more than guesswork.”
Q. What does building this business actually look like right now? What's consuming most of your energy this week?
“It's probably both the most exciting and most exhausting thing I will ever experience. Right now, we're about to launch something that has never existed before, and with that comes a lot of exhilaration, fear, obsession, excitement, and this weird feeling where you feel like you've never worked this much in your life and simultaneously, you just always feel like you could be doing more.
Practically, what is consuming most of my energy right now is making the right decisions across the biggest amount of context switching. You have to really learn to trust yourself and your instincts. Some things I have to make fast calls on, even (and most importantly) when they feel uncomfortable.
My energy this week was mostly used trying to pull myself out of the weeds to view things from above and ensure all the deep decisions we've made over the last six months are coming through properly. Is that the right landing page? Is that messaging in line with everything we've learnt? Will that insight land? Is this the right place to spend capital? Can we be scrappier here while maintaining the value we want to deliver?”
Q. What do you know about stem cell banking and dog longevity that most people, and most of the industry, are still sleeping on?
“Pet longevity isn't a fringe or a get-rich-quick scheme. You won't build a product that adds value if you're just trying to capture a huge market and not add value. A quick win is a sure-fire way to lose trust.
The value is in the defensible product, which is hard to build. If someone has started this year, we're nine months ahead. We've seen problems they've yet to discover.”
“This isn't a fad; this is a really important shift in the way we think about preventative care. It's patient first, and our customers are smarter and deserve more than a lot of people realise.” — Paloma Newton
Q. What's the hardest call you've had to make so far, and would you make the same decision again?
“You'll hear a lot of founders say this, because it's true: people decisions are the hardest. I have learnt to trust my gut more. Yes, I would make the same decisions again, and my true hope is that I make the hard calls faster in the future.
The second one is strategy decisions. You're always making sure you're deciding on the most ambitious version of the company, and only you and your co-founder truly have the full picture. Yes, I'd make the same call. The harder part is making it cleanly, without dragging the team through ambiguity. That's the lesson.”
“Same lesson two ways: trust your gut, move fast, and do what's best for the greater good.” — Paloma Newton
Q. Elita started as a stem cell bank, but it sounds like you always had a bigger vision in mind: using biodata to help owners make smarter decisions across their pet's whole life. When did you realise the bank was actually the foundation for something much larger, and what did it take to back that instinct?
“The bigger vision was always there. What changed was the order of operations. When we talked to early customers, the same thing kept coming up. They didn't want a vault, and they didn't want to act in five years. They wanted to know what to do with the information. They wanted to understand their dog better, catch things earlier, and feel like they were doing right by them across a whole life, not just at one moment in time.
Stem cell banking was the bit of biology we could capture at scale and was a genuine gap in the market. But on its own, it doesn't change your daily impact. The platform does. Backing that instinct meant restructuring the product, the team's focus, and how we talk about the company. It meant telling investors a sharper story. And it meant accepting that the first version of Elita was the foundation, not the building.”
Q. You co-founded a biotech company with no formal science background, and Elita's brand leans much harder into emotional, consumer-facing storytelling than most pet health platforms. Was that a deliberate call from day one, and how do you hold the line between being accessible and credible?
“Yes, very deliberate. Most pet health brands pick a side. Either clinical and cold, all white coats and jargon, which most owners disengage from. Or fluffy and emotional with no substance behind it, which the science community rightly ignores. Both leave the actual customer underserved.
I came in without a science background, but with a co-founder and a scientific and clinical team who have it in spades. My job is to translate, not to perform credibility. I lean on my incredible team and my co-founder. They keep the science honest, they push what's possible. I make sure it's accessible. To be honest, it's been my superpower.
I don't ever need to pretend I know anything, I love being able to ask dumb questions so I can make sure the science, the product and the impact are accessible no matter who you are.”
Q. What's the one thing you wish someone had handed you at the start (a framework, a rule, a piece of advice) that you've had to figure out the hard way?
“Interestingly, I think that everything I had to figure out the hard way I was also told. I don't think there is a shortcut for mistakes. One I hope that I can pass on, even if just as a background note for someone starting out: clarity beats consensus, and it's your job to provide it. Early on, I tried to bring in too many people's opinions on big decisions. The team, investors, advisors, and fellow founders. It felt fair, and it felt collaborative, but it actually created more ambiguity and slowed things down. It made people anxious because the direction from me wasn't clear.”
“My job isn't to be the smartest person, it's to be the clearest. Decide, communicate, and move on. People can disagree with a clear decision, but they can't operate in fog.” — Paloma Newton
Want to follow Elita’s journey?
If you’re looking for a way to secure more good years with your pup, Elita is here to help. Explore what Paloma and the team are building on the Elita website.
For the behind-the-scenes of building the world’s first pet longevity platform from scratch, follow Elita on Instagram.
And if you want to stay across Paloma's journey as a founder, she's worth following on LinkedIn.