Pet tech provider Fi has a new dog collar on the market to enable dog parents to keep up with their dog’s health—including their next belly rub and location.
Fi’s new Series 3+ has been “in the works for years,” Jonathan Bensamoun, founder and CEO of Fi, told Retail Brew. “We always wanted to understand dogs better,” he added.
“Our goal is to really try to understand everything that’s happening to the dog…And everything includes any health issue,” Bensamoun said. “And with all the recent advancements in AI, we saw an opportunity to actually train machine learning models on understanding these behaviors.”
Fi’s new dog collar tracks six dog behaviors including barking, licking, scratching, eating food, and drinking water.
The new AI collar comes with a membership that costs between $14 and $16.50 per month depending on the duration of the plan. The collar was manufactured and assembled in China, and Bensamoun shared that the first shipment arrived just last week in the US: “It’s definitely more difficult to build as much inventory as we would like.”
Bensamoun said Fi has enough stock to cover the first three months, but he’s curious—and a bit concerned—about what might happen if demand takes off after that. In fact, Fi is limiting the marketing of the new tracker to avoid running out of orders. Overall, retailers have been stockpiling inventory just to be safe.
Bensamoun said the tariff situation did add complexity to Fi’s supply chain, when China was potentially hit with some of the steepest tariffs by President Donald Trump. He said the company had to find workarounds for things like out-of-stock electrical components and prepare for long wait times for production.
He recalled that as some companies started holding on to inventory before the tariffs hit, it shot up demand for some of Fi’s existing suppliers in China and that led to once-readily available components to go out-of-stock with lead times stretching much longer.
While the tariff situation is transient, Fi's bread and butter is connected to its technology. Prior to the Series 3+, Fi’s pet devices only tracked activity levels and sleep.
“We expect this new AI breakthrough to make it even more exciting for dog owners to get one of these—not only to track their dogs via GPS for safety but also now to monitor their health in detail,” Bensamoun said.
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