Josh Wais

The pitch for Good Dog is deceptively simple. When someone decides to bring a dog into their home, where do they go? Before Wais and co-founder Lauren McDevitt started the company in 2017, the honest answer was: nowhere reliable. Listings were scattered across classifieds and Facebook groups. Good breeders looked identical to bad ones on a screen. Shelters and rescues ran on their own islands. And a family that just wanted a healthy dog had no way to tell a responsible source from a scam.

Wais's answer was to build the vetting layer that the market never had. Good Dog screens the breeders, shelters, and rescues it lists against expert-backed standards, then guides prospective owners through the whole process, from first search to bringing a dog home. The company describes itself as using technology as a force for good: to educate the public, defend responsible breeders, and connect people directly with sources they can trust.

The idea did not arrive in a boardroom. It came from Wais and McDevitt's own search for a puppy to add to their family, an experience they found surprisingly broken. As they dug in, they kept hearing the same thing from others: people gave up on the search entirely because they could not figure out the process, and some fell into scams or unknowingly bought from puppy mills. What looked like a personal annoyance turned out to be a widespread failure of information.

That framing, connecting good with good, is the whole company in a sentence. Good breeders, good shelters, good rescues, good owners, good dogs, all in one place, with the bad actors screened out. In a pet industry estimated at roughly $70 billion, with about 9 million dogs entering U.S. homes each year, Wais saw a large market running without a trust layer, and set out to build one.

He came to the problem as an operator, not a hobbyist. Before Good Dog, Wais spent three years at Jet.com, the e-commerce company later acquired by Walmart, where he worked across product, strategy, and operations as the team scaled from about 30 people to more than 2,500. That kind of hyper-growth teaches a founder how marketplaces actually behave under pressure, and how quickly trust erodes when supply outruns quality control.

His path there was unusual. Wais studied at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, then joined Qualcomm in 2006 in strategic business development. In 2009 he moved to Qualcomm Ventures as an investment professional, learning the venture side of the table. In 2011 he co-founded Wantworthy and served as its COO, building the product and an iOS app called Fresh. By the time he got to Jet.com in 2014, he had seen technology companies from the inside as an operator, an investor, and a founder.

Good Dog launched publicly in 2019 and raised $6.7 million in seed funding, followed by a Series A that brought total funding past $18 million. The backer list is notable: institutional investors like Felicis, BoxGroup, Slow Ventures, Fuel Capital, BarkBox, and SV Angel, alongside angels who are themselves consumer-brand founders, including the people behind Warby Parker, Harry's, Eventbrite, Flatiron Health, PillPack, and LearnVest. It reads like a group of people who understand how hard it is to build a trusted consumer brand from scratch.

The problem Good Dog attacks is emotional as much as commercial. Getting a dog is not a routine purchase; it is a years-long commitment made with imperfect information and high feelings. Wais's bet is that the way to serve that moment is not more listings, but fewer and better ones, each one vetted. "We allow everyone to spend more time making the right match," he has said, "and less time hassling with logistics."

Years in, the company Wais leads has grown to a team of around 170 and works with more than 1,000 vetted sources across the country. The mission has stayed narrow and consistent: be the place people trust when they decide to bring a dog home. For a founder who has scaled someone else's marketplace and now runs his own, that focus is the point.