Vets First Choice has closed its previously announced merger with Henry Schein Animal Health, a business combination that has created the largest (when measured by revenue) publicly traded company in Maine.

The new company, called Covetrus, is a global animal-health technology and services company, and is headquartered in Portland. It employs more than 5,000 people, including Vets First Choice’s core workforce of 300 based in Portland. Ben Shaw, who was co-founder and CEO of Vets First Choice, will remain as CEO of Covetrus.

The company, which is building a new $20 million office building on the Portland waterfront, plans to add more than 900 jobs, including in high-tech fields, in Portland over the next three years, according to Shaw.

The company has pro forma 2018 revenue of more than $4 billion, which makes it the largest publicly traded company in Maine when measuring by revenue, surpassing Idexx Laboratories, which posted nearly $2 billion in revenue in 2017. However, Idexx retains its status of most valuable publicly traded company in the state with a market cap of nearly $18 billion, compared to Covetrus’ market cap of $4.56 billion.

The merger brings together two companies that target the global animal health market, which exceeded $150 billion in 2017, according to the company. Vets First Choice was by far the smaller of the pair.

Founded in 2010 by Ben Shaw and his father, David Shaw, Vets First Choice provides technology solutions and back-end pharmacy services to veterinary practices throughout the country. The Shaws recognized that veterinarians were leaving money on the table by sending customers home with prescriptions for pet medications that they could not fill themselves (because most vet practices don’t have the resources to stock a full pharmacy), which meant customers were turning to online pharmacies like www.1800petmeds.com to fill prescriptions. What Vets First Choice did is offer to provide veterinarian practices with a white-label e-commerce website, so customers could order prescriptions online from their own vet, but handle all the back-office operations and order fulfillment from a central pharmacy and warehouse, which it had located in Omaha, Neb., taking a cut in the revenue.

Henry Schein Animal Health brings a range of products and services to Covetrus, including pharmacy services, medical products, software for managing veterinary practices, and laboratory and testing services.

Now joined, the companies claim to have roughly 100,000 customers globally in over 100 countries, including 90% of U.S. veterinary practices as customers. Outside the United States, its largest market is Europe, where it has 45,000 customers.

“These are the very early days for our organization and we’re just scratching the surface,” Shaw said. “So we have a lot to look forward to.”

NASDAQ debut

Covetrus retained the public status of Henry Schein Animal Health, which was spun off from Henry Schein Inc. (Nasdaq: HSIC), and made its debut on the Nasdaq on Friday morning. It trades under the ticker symbol CVET. The stock closed on Friday at $41.01, a nearly 5% dip from the price at the open. Meanwhile, S&P announced that Covetrus would be added to the S&P MidCap 400 index.

David and Ben Shaw at the Nasdaq to ring the opening bell on Feb. 8, 2019.

Ben Shaw and Covetrus’ management team marked the milestone by visiting the Nasdaq exchange on Friday morning to ring the opening bell.

“It was an incredibly epic experience,” Shaw told Maine Startups Insider later that morning. “It was an epic milestone on so many levels, not just the coming together of two special organizations and the bright future ahead, but acknowledging the journey of Vets First Choice. It’s the end of an era, but the start of a new one. There’s a real sense of excitement and expectation around what we can do going forward.”

(David Shaw, who co-founded Vets First Choice with Ben, who is his son, and is the company’s chairman, was also on hand to ring the bell. This was the second time David Shaw was there to ring the Nasdaq opening bell: he previously rang it in June 1991 when Idexx, the animal health company he founded in the 1980s in Portland, debuted on the exchange.)

LOCAL IMPACT

Vets First Choice is arguably the state’s most successful startup of the past decade. Today, well beyond the startup phase, the company is a global player in the multi-billion dollar animal health industry and will have both direct and indirect impacts on the local community.

An obvious direct impact is jobs. The company expects to employ 1,200 people at its new Portland headquarters within three years, Shaw said. Some of the new jobs will be in high-tech fields such as software development, biotech, R&D, pharmaceuticals, and data security.

The new $20 million headquarters is expected to include a state-of-the-art specialty pharmacy; an automated commercial pharmacy and fulfillment center; a world-class science, technology, engineering and math center; and office space. It’s scheduled to be complete next year.

“We’ve created a lot of career optionality for folks who call Portland, Maine, home and I think we all benefit from that,” Shaw said.

An indirect benefit is that the company is, and will continue to be, a big consumer of local products and services, Shaw said.

“Hopefully we continue to benefit from innovation and new ideas from our local market,” he said.

He also recognizes the indirect benefit a large company like Covetrus can have on the local startup community for acting not only as a magnet for talent, but as a training ground for next year’s successful innovators and entrepreneurs.

“I’m an entrepreneur and founder at heart,” Shaw tells Maine Startups Insider. “I love those early stages of ideation and creativity and I imagine others at Vets First Choice will move on to become entrepreneurs and start new companies and I hope we’re the beneficiaries of that… Though they shouldn’t leave soon as we have a lot to do over the next few years.”

And don’t forget that successful companies can be a source of inspiration.

“To take a company from formation to the public markets and operate at a global scale is a really awesome journey and I think we’ve demonstrated that you can do something like that from Portland, Maine, and I hope others follow in our footsteps,” he said.