Exclusive: Fi is bringing Starlink satellite technology to dog collars

Jonathan Bensamoun has a 100-pound German Shepherd named Thor—and a story every dog owner knows.

A few years ago, while in the Hamptons, his perfectly-trained shepherd spotted a family of deer. “He looks at me, looks at the deer,” Bensamoun recalled. “And he just bolted.” For several minutes, Bensamoun was powerless. Luckily Thor returned on his own. 

That moment is what Bensamoun built Fi—a smart collar company that tracks pets’ locations and monitors their health in real time—to solve. Now the startup is launching the Fi Ultra, the first dog collar to run on Starlink’s direct-to-cell satellite network, Fortune learned exclusively.

Every GPS pet tracker on the market—from Fi’s older models to rivals Tractive and Garmin—relies on ground-based LTE cell towers to relay a dog’s location to an........

© Fortune