Built on Purpose: How American Service Pets Is Bringing Peace of Mind—One Patient, One Pet at a Time

Chris Picou has never been able to remember a time in his life when he didn’t have a dog. What he didn’t fully understand, until he received a formal mental health diagnosis in 2014, was that those animals had been helping him cope all along, providing emotional regulation he’d simply never had language for. That realization, personal and hard-won, came to form the foundation of a company that’s since helped more than 325,000 people across all 50 states access licensed mental health professionals and find out whether their own pets might do the same for them.

In 2017, Picou came across a blog post about emotional support animals. What he found troubled him: a landscape awash with misleading claims and companies willing to sell fraudulent documentation to people desperately looking for a solution to their problems. As CEO and co-founder of Lido Labs, a digital marketing company he’d built from the ground up, Picou had both the technical know-how and the entrepreneurial drive to build something better. Alongside co-founders Kenny Parkerson and John Hernandez—all three of them dog owners—he began developing American Service Pets, a platform that would connect people with real, licensed mental health professionals in their own states, for proper clinical evaluations, with documentation issued only when clinically appropriate.

Grit, Wit, and Grind

American Service Pets wasn’t jumpstarted through venture capital. It was built month by month on reinvested profits and what Picou calls “grit, wit, and grind.” The team spent close to a year before launch developing their proprietary telehealth software and recruiting an initial network of licensed psychologists, starting in California. On June 24, 2018, they connected their first patient with a licensed clinician.

The process is straightforward by design: fill out a structured online health questionnaire that a licensed mental health professional reviews, and, if clinically appropriate, issues an Emotional Support Animal (ESA) or Psychiatric Service Animal (PSA) letter. Patients are always matched with a professional licensed to practice in their state, and the entire evaluation happens through a secure telehealth platform, often in a matter of hours rather than weeks. Building that nationwide network of licensed professionals with coverage across all 50 states took more than three years of painstaking work.

In 2023, the company landed at spot 764 on the Inc. 5000 List of America’s fastest-growing private companies. In June 2025 alone, American Service Pets helped more than 49,000 people find doctors and mental health professionals, with thousands of five-star reviews.

The Patients Are the Point

Ask Picou what drives him and he doesn’t reach for a statistic but a story.

There’s the woman whose dog, Bella, alerted her husband when she collapsed with a 104.9-degree fever from a back infection after months of hospitalization. There’s the woman whose divorce left her unable to work, eat, or sleep, for whom her cat Maui became the reason she got out of bed every morning. There’s the man living with PTSD, heart failure, and the aftereffects of stroke, whose dogs alert him when his heart rate rises or when it’s time to medicate.

“I am driven by the stories I hear from the patients we serve,” Picou says. “The stories of everyday people who are hurting, and in this incredibly divided and broken world, all they have is their pet.”

These stories arrive at American Service Pets every day, and they’re the reason the company exists.

Making Training Accessible to Everyone

For patients whose conditions require more than emotional support, and particularly those who may need a task-trained Psychiatric Service Animal to help manage a psychiatric episode, the path forward has historically been prohibitively expensive. Professional service dog training can cost thousands of dollars, putting it out of reach for most people managing mental health conditions.

In 2022, American Service Pets launched iTrain Academy: a comprehensive online curriculum delivering professional video instruction to any TV or mobile device, module by module at the patient’s own pace, with certification at each completed step, for less than $40 per month. A behavioral dog training curriculum followed in 2024. Tens of thousands of people have now completed the program, saving money they didn’t have on professional trainer fees and building a qualitatively different relationship with their animals in the process.

The inspiration’s partly personal. Picou’s partner is an expert dog trainer; watching her work with his own goldendoodle, Roux—a task-trained PSA who accompanies him almost everywhere—has given Picou a firsthand understanding of what a well-trained dog is genuinely capable of, and a conviction that the people American Service Pets serves deserve the same experience.

A Fight Worth Having

What nobody warned the founders about was how much of the work would turn out to be advocacy. People with invisible disabilities who rely on their animals face real stigma from landlords, property managers, and a public that often views their documentation with skepticism. American Service Pets’ call center became something closer to a support line for patients in genuine distress, people facing the prospect of being separated from animals on which their mental health depends.

More recently, the company has had to contend with aggressive lobbying by apartment associations pushing lawmakers in multiple states to restrict housing accommodations for assistance animals under guidelines set by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), which operates within the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and with a growing ecosystem of third-party pet screening services, many of whose practices raise serious patient privacy and HIPAA concerns. American Service Pets’ response has been to invest in patient education and to support accountability efforts against corporations that infringe on patient rights.

“Changing the narrative around emotional support animals has been the hardest part of our work,” Picou says. “Very quickly we realized our effort to provide a service to people in need escalated to becoming their advocate against the blatant discrimination and criticism many of them are subjected to.”

Roux, the goldendoodle who goes almost everywhere Picou goes, is his daily reminder of where all of this started: not with a business plan, but with a bond. A recognition that connection, real and daily and unconditional connection at that, can be exactly what holds us together.

That’s what American Service Pets is in the business of protecting. For more than 325,000 people and counting, it’s working.

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