PetMatch: AI that finds the real pet who shares your pet's face

Upload one photo of your dog or cat. Our AI (YOLOv8 face crop → DINOv2 embeddings) searches 50,000+ real pets and shows the one that looks most like yours — with a similarity score. Free. The match is a real pet with a real owner, and you can meet them.

Hi PH! I'm Arrie, I built PetMatch solo. It started as a joke — my cat Po looks like every British Shorthair meme — and turned into a real ML pipeline: a YOLOv8 face detector crops the pet's face, DINOv2 turns it into an embedding, and pgvector finds the closest face among 50,000+ real pets. The thing that surprised me: purebred matches are expected, but the rescue mixes are where it gets uncanny. Dogs from opposite sides of the world with the same eyebrow patches and the same crooked ear. Everything's free: upload a photo, meet the twin, share the side-by-side. If the twin belongs to a member, you can send a connection request and actually meet the owner. Things I'd love feedback on: match quality on unusual-looking pets, and what you'd want to happen after you find the twin. AMA about the pipeline — happy to go deep on the embedding choices.

Fun fact from building this: the hardest pets to match are solid black cats in dim lighting — almost no pattern signal for the model to grip. The easiest? Australian Shepherds; those coat patterns are basically fingerprints. If you've got a void cat, use a bright window-light photo and it works dramatically better. 🐈‍⬛

Just for fun while the launch runs: here's a real match from the pool — Po (my British Shorthair) and her 77% twin, found from one photo: https://petmatched.com/#how

If you try it with your own pet, drop the side-by-side link here — I want to see the most uncanny match of the day. 🐾

Just for fun while the launch runs: here's a real match from the pool — Po (my British Shorthair) and her 77% twin, found from one photo: https://petmatched.com/#how

If you try it with your own pet, drop the side-by-side link here — I want to see the most uncanny match of the day. 🐾