In the summer of 2020, Wilbur Labs launched Barkbus to help build the future of pet care.
At the time, direct-to-your-door services were booming, and we had a firm belief that mobile dog grooming should be the new normal. It’s less stressful for pets, it’s less time-consuming for humans, and it makes everything easier for both. We knew Barkbus could build a category-defining brand, but what surprised us was just how many people outside the company shared that same conviction—and passion.
Anyone who’s been around a new puppy knows how fast dogs take over the conversation. It turns out that when one of your portfolio companies is focused on pampering pets, the reaction is no different. We happily obliged every time the conversation turned to pups over the past five years.
It’s been a thrill to see Barkbus grow from just two vans roaming around Los Angeles to 200-plus mobile grooming stations operating in 15 states and counting. The company is on track to complete over 200,000 hours of pet care services in 2025 alone.
Recently, Barkbus reached another major milestone: Last year it joined forces with Groombuggy, bringing together the top two leaders in mobile dog grooming. Moving forward, the combined business operates under the Barkbus name, with Groombuggy fully integrated into a single platform and team. Together, the company’s dream is stronger than ever: to deliver joy to pets and their people across the country as the nation's largest mobile dog grooming company.
This milestone is a testament to how far Barkbus has come, and for us at Wilbur Labs, it’s a good time to look back at how we got here, why the idea worked, and what’s next for Barkbus.
We built Barkbus from the ground up, after acquiring two vans and the brand name in 2020. Despite having no technology or infrastructure, and being run as a side project, its customers returned again and again. The grooming calendar was so tightly booked with current clients that it hadn’t been able to take on new ones in two years. This pattern was common in mobile dog grooming: Independent groomers built loyal books of business but couldn’t operate efficiently or scale because they lacked the technology and infrastructure to manage routing, scheduling, and customer experience.
That gap was our “why now.” We believed that with modern tech and AI, the business could deliver the same highly personalized service, but at real scale. At the time, the world was transitioning to direct-to-your-door services, especially in the wake of the COVID pandemic. The opportunity, in hindsight, was obvious, but the investment also aligned squarely with Wilbur Labs’ collective strengths.
Jeff Safenowitz joined as Barkbus’s CEO, bringing experience from WeWork, where he’d helped develop operating playbooks and manage large, real-world portfolios in major markets. Patrick Riley, Barkbus’s founder and Chief Product Officer, brought extensive product expertise shaped by years of building design-forward, technology-driven companies, including Krop. Together, we co-founded Barkbus into the company it is today. Paired with Wilbur Labs’ studio resources and funding, Barkbus moved faster and more deliberately than others in the space. This showed up clearly with local automation across growth, customer relationship management (CRM), and customer service—areas where the studio team applied deep insights from building and scaling businesses facing similar challenges. Those systems helped Barkbus operate more efficiently without losing the personalized experience at its core.
This was critical to Barkbus’s growth, because mobile grooming is not an easy business. It’s physically and operationally complex. Groomers, vans, routes, schedules, inventory, and customer communication all have to work together, every day. When one piece slips, the experience suffers. When they all click, customers return again and again.
As we started planning for growth, we all quickly recognized that scaling the business would require developing unique infrastructure, since nothing off the shelf met the company’s needs to orchestrate all the moving parts. To solve that challenge, the Barkbus team built a custom, proprietary CRM that became the backbone of the company, unifying customer data, pet profiles, appointment history, groomer notes, photos, and communication into a single system. Setting up that clean, structured foundation allowed Barkbus to optimize routes, improve appointment density, match groomers and customers more intelligently, and automate scheduling and support without losing the personal touch.
Over time those capabilities expanded to include AI-assisted booking, customer service, and personalization. To pet parents the experience felt effortless. Behind the scenes it was anything but. But the effort paid off. Barkbus scaled into the largest mobile dog-grooming company in the country while maintaining five-star experiences and strong loyalty along the way.
While grand visions don’t always become reality, in this case they did so faster than we ever expected.
By the time Barkbus and Groombuggy began exploring a combination, each had already built real momentum. Barkbus redefined the experience of mobile pet grooming and proved that scaling the 1:1 experience to pet parents everywhere was possible. Groombuggy, led by CEO Sander Daniels, was growing quickly in several incremental markets and was backed by leading investors in the space. Each brought something the other could amplify, making it a clear “1+1=3” situation.
Together the combined company is accelerating a shared vision: bringing high-quality, to-your-door pet care to more pet parents, more reliably, in more places.
For Wilbur Labs, this milestone marks the end of one chapter and the beginning of another. Barkbus moves forward with its own leadership and vision, opening the door to what comes next.
Category-defining companies don’t come along often, especially in industries that haven’t changed in decades—and rarely, if ever, where the end customer (the pets) are so universally adored. Barkbus is transforming expectations for what pet care can be, and its story is just getting started.
