Chris Picou didn’t set out to disrupt anything. He set out to find a legitimate ESA letter — and couldn’t. What he built instead became one of America’s fastest-growing companies.
Most businesses that address a real gap do so because the founder lived the problem first. For Chris Picou, the CEO of American Service Pets, that moment came in 2017, when a search for legitimate ESA documentation returned nothing useful — just a landscape of fraudulent websites and hollow certifications.
Picou had received a formal diagnosis of Attention Deficit Disorder and Compulsive Behavioral Disorder years earlier. Dogs had been essential in helping him through life’s hardest stretches, though he hadn’t always had the language to explain why. After coming across a blog post about Emotional Support Animals, he started investigating how to formalize his pet’s role — and discovered that the legitimate path barely existed. What he did come across were certification mills with little clinical basis or licensed professional involvement.
Picou, already the CEO of Lido Labs, a digital marketing and technology company, recognized the gap immediately: people who genuinely needed their animals were being failed by a system that offered the appearance of documentation without any of the substance. He knew what a solvable problem looked like. So he and co-founders Kenneth Parkerson and John Hernandez got to work.
Building the Bridge
Nearly a year passed before the first service was delivered, with the bulk of that time dedicated to building the necessary infrastructure. The founders developed proprietary software designed to enable secure online psychological evaluations between licensed mental health professionals (LMHPs) and patients, while recruiting psychologists and LMHPs on a state-by-state basis.
The real breakthrough was structural: a HIPAA-compliant system that connected patients with state-licensed mental health professionals, solving two problems at once — giving the patient an affordable path to receive legitimate clinical evaluation, and giving licensed professionals a compliant channel to reach an underserved population.
Their first match was completed on June 24, 2018, when a patient in California was connected with an LMHP. They served 78 people that month, with no external funding — every dollar of growth was reinvested.
The American Service Pets platform has now facilitated connections between more than 325,000 people and licensed mental health professionals for Emotional Support Animal and Psychiatric Service Animal evaluations. For its efforts, the firm was ranked No. 764 on the 2023 Inc. 5000 list of America’s fastest-growing private companies.
The Second Invention
Growing the platform presented a hurdle in itself. Yet as the team delved further, a different issue emerged.
Psychiatric Service Animals (PSAs) are not the same as Emotional Support Animals (ESAs). While an ESA provides companionship and emotional support through presence, a PSA is trained to carry out particular tasks to assist someone with a psychiatric condition, such as interrupting a panic attack, ensuring personal space in a large crowd, or waking a handler from a nightmare. Training a PSA is allowed under federal laws and regulations, but the reality is that hiring a professional trainer can cost thousands of dollars — a barrier that puts the option out of reach for most of the people who need it.
American Service Pets created iTrain Academy in 2022 to address this directly: an at-home dog training curriculum built around professionally produced video modules, detailed step-by-step guides, and certification tied to each completed module. Handlers could work through it at their own pace, on any device, and train their dog to perform tasks relevant to their specific disability.
Tens of thousands of dog owners have now taken the course since its creation, with a behavioral training curriculum added in 2024. iTrain Academy was designed specifically for the people most likely to need it: individuals managing mental health challenges who also face housing and access barriers that put their ability to keep a pet at risk.
Innovation Under Pressure
The innovation story of American Service Pets is not only about the technology behind it, but the process by which they’ve innovated in a changing environment.
As the platform became increasingly popular, landlord groups began pressuring state governments to impose tighter regulations on Emotional Support Animals. Rather than treating this as purely a threat, the company found ways to respond that strengthened what it offered.
“Often opportunities come disguised as issues,” says Picou, “and the way we respond to them allows us to bring more value to the patients we serve.”
American Service Pets supports the reasonable validation of ESA documentation. What it opposes are practices that cross into discrimination or HIPAA violations — violations of the state or federal legal protections to which patients with valid documentation are entitled. The same instinct that built the company’s original platform continues to drive what it builds next.
“There is no product until there is a problem,” says Picou. “Products are about fixing something for someone else and doing it in a way where you make a positive impact on people.”
Three hundred twenty-five thousand people later, American Service Pets continues to operate on that same principle — finding the gaps, building the fix, and making sure the people who need it most can actually access it.
