Harvard Innovation Labs Companies – i-lab – Baroo – 7/43

Baroo

Baroo provides convenient, high quality care for city-dwelling pets. Baroo offers full service pet care, conveniently delivered to your door. No need to dash home for a mid-day walk or try to squeeze in a trip to the groomer, we’ll take care of that. Leaving you more time for puppy kisses, couch snuggles, and games of fetch.

Website

http://www.baroo.co/

Team News

• Baroo: Boston Startup Brings On Demand Pet Care to the City

Ok, the on-demand movement has been flourishing for quite some time, but one industry that is just starting to make its way into the space is pet care. The industry has been slow to adopt technology altogether, but that’s changing.

We recently highlighted a new app built to help people live better lives with their dogs and now we get a look at a team out of the Harvard i-Lab who is bringing on-demand pet care to luxury apartment complexes.

Early last year, Lindsay Hyde and Meghan Reiss (picture below with their dogs (Hyde, left; Reiss, right)) launched Baroo, who partners with premium apartment buildings to deliver high-quality pet care services straight to residents’ doors, including walks for dogs, and grooming, feeding, bathing and pet sitting for both dogs and cats.

As we often find with startups, the idea came about as a solution to one’s own problem.

In 2012 Hyde, left her post as President of Strong Women, Strong Girls, a Boston-based not-for-profit organization she founded as a Freshman at Harvard. Having started the organization while a student, Hyde built and ran the company for more than twelve years before departing to enter Harvard Business School.

“I was passionate about entrepreneurship and ready for a new challenge, but I had spent my entire career in the nonprofit sector. I decided to go to business school to better understand the for-profit world, gain new skills, and become a part of the amazing community that HBS provides.” 

Then Hyde got a dog…

Living in Boston and married to another entrepreneur, Hyde and her husband got a dog and it wasn’t long before they realized the challenges that come along with having and caring for their newest family member.

“We struggled to find pet care to begin with and once we did, it was hard to schedule and highly variable in quality. Transactions were cash only, scheduling was inefficient and unreliable, and there wasn’t any technology helping the process.”