Serenity Vet adds enterprise tier as corporate vet groups face mounting relief-labor costs

Relief-DVM staffing is being repriced as financial governance, not scheduling. Serenity Vet, the veterinary relief platform co-founded by Dr. Andrew Ciccolini, released a corporate tier this week that lets multi-location veterinary groups govern relief operations across all hospitals from a single account, with centralized profitability targets, labor-expense caps, and clinic-level autonomy preserved underneath.

The release is small in feature count and large in positioning. Serenity Vet is no longer pitching itself as a relief-shift booking tool. It is pitching itself as a financial governance system for the most variable line on a vet group's P&L.

Serenity Vet launches corporate-tier relief management

The new functionality is aimed at multi-location veterinary organizations. Corporate operators can now manage relief staffing across all hospitals under a single account, set clinic-specific profitability targets, cap relief-labor expenses, and view centralized operational data across the network, while preserving clinic-level autonomy on hiring and scheduling.

The product retains the existing subscription pricing model, starting at $299/month for clinics that bring their own relief network. Clinics can either source relief DVMs through Serenity Vet's marketplace or invite the relief veterinarians they already work with.

A customer reference came from Katie Puccio, Strategy Manager at Sploot Veterinary Care, a Denver-headquartered group with locations across Colorado, Chicago, and Salt Lake City, and a strategic investment from L Catterton that closed in January 2024. Puccio characterized the rollout as enabling standardized guardrails and analytics for governing relief operations across hospitals with different operational dynamics.

The Profitability Calculator that anchors the new tier suggests an optimal pay range for each relief shift based on individual hospital economics. A hospital in San Diego and a hospital in Wichita are explicitly framed as needing different sustainable rates.

Where Serenity Vet sits against Roo and the corporate vet stack

The relief-vet category has been defined for the past three years by Roo, the San Francisco marketplace that closed $11M in Series A funding in January 2023, bringing total funding to roughly $18.5M per PitchBook. Roo's commercial model is per-shift fees on a transaction marketplace. Serenity Vet's is monthly subscription on a workflow tool. The two are competing for the same buyer with structurally different unit economics.

The enterprise release positions Serenity Vet against a buyer Roo's per-shift marketplace was not built for: corporate veterinary operators, including Mars Veterinary Health, NVA/Ethos, Compassion-First Pet Hospitals, MedVet, AmeriVet, and L Catterton- and JAB-style growth-stage roll-ups. These groups run dozens to hundreds of hospitals and treat relief labor as a corporate financial line, not a hospital-by-hospital scheduling problem.

Relief DVM rates run roughly 30–60% above full-time DVM hourly equivalents per industry surveys, and Serenity Vet's own published research backs the higher end of that range. For a group running 30+ hospitals, a 10% reduction in relief spend is the kind of number that moves operating income meaningfully on a quarterly basis. Software that can guarantee that reduction with auditable guardrails sits in a different commercial conversation than scheduling tools.

The submission filed through Full Slice Agency, not direct from company. The Sploot reference is the substantive proof point. The rest of the release reads as positioning rather than traction disclosure. No customer count, ARR, or growth metric is attached to the enterprise tier.

What converts the positioning into category-defining traction

Three signals worth tracking over the next two quarters.

A named corporate-group customer beyond Sploot. Sploot is a credible reference, L-Catterton-backed, multi-state, founder-led. It is also a sub-10-hospital operator. The enterprise pitch is structurally aimed at the 50+ hospital tier. A signed Compassion-First, AmeriVet, MedVet, or mid-sized regional like Heart + Paw converts the positioning into a category claim.

Roo's response. Roo has spent the last 18 months expanding into adjacent products, including the Roo Uni externship platform in August 2025. Whether Roo answers the enterprise governance tier with an analogous corporate offering, or stays on the per-shift marketplace, defines the competitive geometry of the relief category through 2027.

Pricing disclosure at the enterprise tier. The $299/month SMB pricing is published. Enterprise pricing is not. The eventual per-hospital or per-DVM enterprise unit economics will tell whether the financial-governance pitch holds up at scale or breaks against Roo's transactional pricing on volume.

Source: Serenity Vet company-submitted announcement, May 21, 2026. Verified against dvm360, Veterinary Innovation Podcast, and Serenity Vet's published company materials.

This news brief is based on a company-submitted announcement. The Underbite verifies claims where possible but cannot independently confirm all details.