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 owner’s phone. The moment a pet bolts past the last tower, the tracker goes dark. Fi’s partnership with Starlink’s direct-to-cell network is meant to sidestep that. SpaceX has launched more than 650 satellites that each function like a cell tower in orbit, communicating directly with LTE-enabled devices on the ground. No dish, no special hardware—just a clear view of the sky.
“The main limitation of all the tracking products out there is that they are using the LTE network,” Bensamoun told Fortune. “Starlink obviously offers satellite technology—kind of omniscient access, at least in the US for now.”
