Encore Vet Group is a Saratoga Springs, New York-based community of veterinary hospitals founded in 2018 by Ted Sprinkle, DVM, Lance Sprinkle, and Bo Iler. Rather than running a top-down corporate chain, Encore acquires established community and legacy veterinary practices and then hands the day-to-day medicine and culture back to the local teams while layering on business support, leadership training, and mental-health resources. Backed by private-equity firm North Castle Partners, the group has grown to roughly 60 hospitals and around 1,900-2,200 team members, and it operates education platforms like Encore Performance Academy and the MentorCore virtual mentorship program for new graduates.
Ted Sprinkle, DVM, is a Cornell-trained veterinarian turned serial entrepreneur who has spent the second half of his career building veterinary consolidators that buy community animal hospitals while leaving their culture intact. He co-founded Encore Vet Group in 2018 with his son Lance and Bo Iler, and led it as CEO through a growth run to roughly 2,200 employees before transitioning to executive chairman in late 2025. Before Encore he founded Healthy Pet Corp. (sold to VCA in 2007) and Pet Partners, and earlier ran a leading thoroughbred operation. His pitch is unusually simple for an acquirer: put people first and the medicine, the clients and the numbers follow.
Vetcove is the veterinary industry's unified purchasing platform. It aggregates the catalogs of every major distributor, manufacturer, compounding pharmacy, and diagnostic lab into one searchable storefront, so veterinary practices can compare real-time pricing and stock across all their vendors and order from everyone in one cart. The platform is free for clinics and nonprofits; Vetcove earns revenue from vendors and hospital groups. It serves more than 23,000 veterinary practices across the United States.
Koala Health is a Boston-based digital pet pharmacy built by alumni of PillPack (acquired by Amazon). It packages and delivers chronic pet medications organized by date and time, connecting pet parents directly with their veterinarians through a mobile-first experience. The platform reaches 80+ million pet owners across all 50 states and integrates with more than 25,000 independent veterinary clinics.
Gavin Cotter is the founder and CEO of Koala Health, a Boston-based digital pet pharmacy that delivers chronic pet medications through a mobile-first platform built to work directly with pet parents and their veterinarians. An MIT-trained mechanical engineer turned operations leader, he cut his teeth scaling PillPack's pharmacy operations before Amazon acquired it, then reassembled a core PillPack crew in 2021 to do for animals what PillPack did for people: make managing medications boring, easy, and reliable. Koala has since expanded to all 50 states and raised a $20M Series B led by Valspring Capital in 2025.
Cherry is a San Francisco fintech that lets healthcare and wellness practices offer patients buy-now-pay-later financing at the point of care. Founded in 2019 by Felix Steinmeyer and Charles Mourani, the company underwrites loans up to $50,000 in under 60 seconds with a soft credit pull, pays providers upfront, and is used by more than 60,000 practices across dental, medical aesthetics, dermatology, optometry and veterinary care.
Celine Halioua is the founder and CEO of Loyal, a San Francisco biotech company developing the first FDA-approved drug for lifespan extension - starting with dogs. Born in Austin, Texas to a Moroccan mother and German father, she studied neuroscience at UT Austin and nanotechnology at Uppsala University before pursuing a DPhil at Oxford on the health economics of gene therapy. She left Oxford to join Laura Deming's Longevity Fund as Chief of Staff, then founded Loyal in 2019 at age 24. With $250M+ in total funding and the largest clinical trial ever conducted in animal health (1,300+ dogs across 70+ clinics), Loyal's lead drug LOY-002 has cleared FDA safety and efficacy hurdles - putting it on track to become the first longevity drug ever approved for any species.