Company Profile · Veterinary Pharmacy
Mixlab
The modern veterinary pharmacy. Vets prescribe in seconds. Pets get medicine they will actually take. It arrives at the door.
The modern veterinary pharmacy. Vets prescribe in seconds. Pets get medicine they will actually take. It arrives at the door.
It is 7:14 on a Tuesday morning. A tabby named Olive needs her thyroid medication. She has, over the course of her career, defeated pill pockets, crushed tablets folded into tuna, and one memorable attempt involving a towel. The pill is on the floor. Olive is under the bed. This is the everyday war that Mixlab decided to end.
Mixlab is a veterinary pharmacy, but that description undersells it the way "a place that sells coffee" undersells a roastery. It compounds medicine - mixing a drug into a form an animal will accept, at a dose that fits the patient, in a flavor it might even like. Chicken. Fish. Beef. For Olive, a transdermal gel rubbed on the ear, no swallowing required. Behind that gel sits a software platform her veterinarian used to send the prescription in seconds, and a delivery network that put it on the doorstep without anyone driving to a clinic.
In 2025 the company worked with more than 30,000 prescribers and supported the care of over 140,000 animals. It runs five compounding labs across the country. None of that existed nine years ago. All of it started with the observation that pet pharmacy was stuck in a decade everyone else had already left.
"Technology allows us to personalize the care and experience for the veterinarian, pet parent and the pet."
Stella Kim, Co-founder & Chief Experience OfficerWalk into the average vet clinic and the prescription experience felt borrowed from 2004. Medications could take up to a week. Owners drove back to pick them up. Clinics tied up cash and counter space holding inventory. And the medicine itself often came as a tablet built for a 180-pound human, handed to someone trying to dose a four-pound kitten.
Meanwhile, on the human side, companies like PillPack and Truepill had rebuilt the pharmacy around the patient. Same-day answers. Doorstep delivery. Software that did the boring parts. Pets - roughly the only patients who actively resist their own treatment - got none of it.
The gap was not a lack of medicine. It was a lack of plumbing. The drugs existed; the experience around them did not. That is a quieter problem than a disease, and a harder one to sell, because nobody puts "the workflow is annoying" on a tombstone. But annoying workflows are exactly where animals miss doses and treatments quietly fail.
"The medicine was never the hard part. Getting an animal to take it, on time, again and again - that was the unsolved problem."
The thesis, in one sentenceFrederic Dijols did not have an obvious reason to start a pet pharmacy. He had been a healthcare investment banker at J.P. Morgan and, before that, a medical device engineer at Johnson & Johnson, with degrees from Harvard and Stanford to round out the resume. He had spent his career looking at where healthcare modernized and where it stalled. Veterinary pharmacy, he decided, was a stall worth fixing.
He partnered with Stella Kim, who grew up around the business - her family owns a pharmacy - and who brought the design and customer-experience instinct the category badly lacked. One founder knew how the pipes of healthcare worked; the other knew how to make the thing at the end of the pipe feel human. They started Mixlab in New York in 2017.
The bet was specific: build the pharmacy software-first, treat the veterinarian as the real customer, and treat compounding not as a niche service but as the default. Make the medicine fit the animal, not the other way around. It is the kind of bet that sounds obvious in hindsight and looked like a lot of work at the time, mostly because it was.
"They didn't set out to sell more pills. They set out to make the right pill easy - for the vet who prescribes it and the animal who has to swallow it."
The Mixlab bet, abridgedDijols and Kim launch Mixlab to bring software and design to veterinary compounding.
Led by Sonoma Brands. Shipping to 47 states, growing roughly 3x year over year.
Vanterra Ventures and PLUS Capital back the platform and national expansion.
Compounding expands into large animals - horses included.
Acquires The Pet Apothecary (WI) and SBH's veterinary business (OH); adds a Milwaukee lab, reaching five labs total.
Built on Mixlab's first-party pharmacy data to answer questions and reinforce compliance.
A prescribing platform, a compounding pharmacy, and a delivery service - sold as one calm experience instead of three annoying ones.
Vets write, review and approve prescriptions through a web platform that tracks compliance and integrates with Vetcove, Vetsource and Instinct EMR.
PCAB-accredited, species-specific formulations: flavored chews, transdermal gels, liquids and custom dosages for cats, dogs, horses and exotics.
Fast, free shipping to the owner's door - same-day in markets near a Mixlab lab. The care package often includes a pharmacist note and a toy.
An AI health partner trained on Mixlab's own pharmacy data to answer medication questions and keep treatment on track between visits.
Field note: the bunny in a mailman's uniform on Mixlab's site is not just cute branding - it is a quiet reminder that the patient list includes rabbits, reptiles, and the occasional zoo animal.
"Compounding is the unglamorous heart of it: take a drug an animal needs and turn it into something the animal will accept. Flavor is not a gimmick. Flavor is adherence."
Why the chicken flavor mattersGrowth stories are cheap. These are the figures Mixlab reported for 2025 - the year it roughly doubled its prescriber network and added a fifth lab.
Chart math, honestly: Mixlab published the 2025 totals and the growth rates. The 2024 bars are back-calculated from those rates, so read them as "about," not "to the dollar."
"Vetcove. Vetsource. Instinct EMR. Mixlab grew by fitting into the tools vets already use, not by asking them to switch."
On partnerships that did the quiet workMixlab's stated aim is a better, more personal pharmacy experience for veterinarians, pet parents, and the pets in the middle. That sounds soft until you notice how the company spends its money: on labs, on integrations, on an AI named Maisy whose entire job is to make sure a medication actually gets taken after the prescription is written.
The throughline is adherence. A treatment that an animal refuses is not a treatment - it is a receipt. Every part of Mixlab, from the chicken flavoring to the same-day delivery to the AI follow-up, exists to close the gap between "the vet prescribed it" and "the animal got better." The mission is less about pharmacy and more about follow-through.
"A treatment the patient won't accept is just an expensive suggestion. Mixlab is in the business of making suggestions stick."
The mission, minus the marketingPet healthcare is getting more advanced and more expensive at the same time, which means more animals on more medications for longer. The bottleneck is no longer whether the right drug exists. It is whether a reluctant patient at home actually takes it - and whether a busy veterinarian can manage that without a fax machine and a prayer.
That is the bet Mixlab is now scaling: data-driven compounding plus an AI that watches the part of treatment no human has time to watch. If it works, the pharmacy stops being a place you visit and becomes a thing that quietly works in the background, the way the best infrastructure does.
Which brings us back to Olive, the tabby under the bed. In the old version of this story, her medication arrives late, gets refused, and her thyroid numbers drift. In Mixlab's version, the gel was prescribed in seconds, shipped to the door, flavored to be tolerable, and followed up by a system that notices when a dose is missed. Olive is still annoyed. She is, however, taking her medicine. For a company built to end a standoff with a cat, that is the entire scoreboard.
"The cat still hides. The medicine still works. That, in the end, is the whole product."
Closing argument