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Middlemanning the dogwalking trade is as scalable, if not more so, than ecommerce. Gig-economy work is the creation of value through organization and communication.

$600M in VC money is $2/US citizen. If half of households have a dog, that's ~$8/dog-house. If 10% of them want a dog-walker (the biggest "if"), that's ~$80/customer. At $30/walk, $600M in investment doesn't seem entirely crazy.

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The median American spends their entire monthly budget on rent, transport, and food.

You need to divide $600M by the 7 million households that own dogs in that area. That's $80 per potential customer. And you need to convert and not churn all 7 million.

That calculation assumes that the investor doesn’t get any return on the investment, so that seems a tiny bit optimistic.

Do the dogs just stop needing walks at some point?

No, but after the first walk they are going to ditch the middleman and pay the walker directly

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