Audrey Wystrach was raised on a ranch in southern Arizona by parents she describes as nontraditional, who encouraged their children to chase what they wanted. She wanted to be a veterinarian, and she has said that from the age of seven the ambition never wavered.
Twenty eight years into that career she decided the way veterinary medicine was practiced needed changing, tweaked the model, and launched Petfolk in Charlotte in 2020, according to WSOC. The first clinic opened at 4914 Old Sardis Road in May 2021. Within a year the company had raised $40 million.
It started with a sibling
Petfolk was co-founded by Wystrach and her younger brother, Michael Wystrach, who had founded the meal delivery company Freshly and sold it to Nestle for $1.5 billion, according to WRAL TechWire. He led the Series A alongside White Star Capital, and the celebrity investors who joined that round, country singers Miranda Lambert and Dierks Bentley and NASCAR’s Jimmie Johnson, Erik Jones and Danica Patrick, gave the company a profile most veterinary startups never get.
Audrey Wystrach had built clinics before. She was chief operating officer and co-founder of Zippivet Pet Hospitals in Austin and a founding board member of the Veterinary Virtual Care Association, and Petfolk’s model comes from what she calls the key learnings of nearly three decades in practice. The company describes itself as built by vets, for vets, and the idea is to make care easier for the people giving it as well as receiving it.
The model combines physical clinics, mobile units and a 24 hour virtual care service, what the company calls connected care. Wystrach told the Charlotte Observer it was customer centric, meant to eliminate stress and wait times by meeting the customer where they want to be met.
The people behind it
Wystrach is co-founder and co-chief executive, and she has become one of the more visible figures in a profession short of veterinarians. Her pitch to investors and to pet owners is the same: the fragmented, understaffed veterinary business can be rebuilt around transparency and access, and the vets who work in it should be treated as the point instead of the cost.
The company raised $40 million in a Series B led by Movendo Capital in 2023 and $36 million in a Series C led by Deerfield Management in October 2024, according to funding trackers. By then it operated 19 clinics across seven markets with plans for 40, and Newsweek had placed it in the top five of a global list of most loved workplaces, a ranking that speaks to the employment model more than the medicine.
What you actually get
Charlotte has clinics on Old Sardis Road and on Ballantyne Commons Parkway, the SouthPark area clinic that appears in our directory, and the company runs mobile wellness clinics in partnership with Pet Supplies Plus stores and with Skiptown, the South End dog park. Services run from wellness exams, vaccinations and dental care to surgery, diagnostics and urgent care, delivered in spaces designed not to feel like a clinic.
The detail customers mention most is the phone. Petfolk quotes transparently before an appointment, which is rare enough in veterinary care that it appears in almost every review. The app books visits, holds records and connects to the virtual service, so a question at midnight has somewhere to go.
The celebrity round drew attention, but the company’s own description of its edge is about labor. Veterinary medicine has a shortage of practitioners and a burnout problem, and Petfolk’s vet minded employment model, in its own phrase, is the part meant to fix that. The Newsweek workplace ranking in 2024 was the external measure. The internal one is whether the company can staff forty clinics in a profession that cannot fill the ones it has.
Wystrach has also pioneered virtual care as a piece of the model, connecting a 24 hour video and chat service to in clinic visits so a pet owner has an answer before deciding whether to drive. She co-founded the Veterinary Virtual Care Association to set standards for that work, and the company’s app is built around it. The expansion has reached Texas, Utah and beyond, with the Charlotte clinics as the original template and the Old Sardis Road site as the first door the company ever opened.
Why it matters
Veterinary medicine has a workforce crisis and a pricing problem, and the pet owners who feel both are the ones waiting weeks for an appointment and paying a bill they did not see coming. Petfolk is a Charlotte attempt to fix both at once, funded like a technology company and staffed by veterinarians who were promised something better than the practices they left.
The company will be judged over years, not funding rounds. What is already true is that a veterinarian who grew up on an Arizona ranch chose this city to build it in, and that a good share of the national money behind her came from people who race cars here.