Fi launches $199 Starlink-powered Ultra collar to beat LTE dead zones for dog tracking

Jonathan Bensamoun built Fi around one terrifying, familiar dog-owner moment: his 100-pound German Shepherd, Thor, spotted deer in the Hamptons and “just bolted,” leaving him powerless until the dog returned. Now, Bensamoun is turning that pain point into a product upgrade, launching the Fi Ultra, Fortune learned exclusively. The Fi Ultra is the first dog collar to run on Starlink’s direct-to-cell satellite network, replacing the ground-based LTE approach that has historically left trackers blind the moment a pet moves past the last tower.

Here’s why this change is more than a clever tech flex. Every GPS pet tracker on the market, from Fi’s older models to rivals Tractive and Garmin, relies on LTE cell towers to relay location data to an owner’s phone. The moment a pet bolts past the last tower, the tracker goes dark. Fi’s partnership with Starlink is meant to sidestep that exact failure mode by communicating through satellites instead of demanding a clear path to LTE coverage on the ground.

SpaceX has launched more than 650 satellites that function like cell towers in orbit, transmitting directly with LTE-enabled devices on the ground. No dish. No special hardware required, just a clear view of the sky. Bensamoun told Fortune that the “main limitation” of tracking products is that they are “using the LTE network,” and he framed Starlink as offering “satellite technology-kind of omniscient access, at least in the US for now.” In other words, this is a connectivity strategy aimed at turning “maybe we can see where your dog is” into “we can still see where your dog is,” even when terrain, distance, or rural coverage would normally break the link.

The Ultra comes with a price that makes it easy to compare against the category baseline rather than treat it as a science project. It costs $199 for the hardware plus Fi’s existing $99-per-six-months membership. For subscribers already in the Fi ecosystem, Fortune reports that they only have to buy the new tech. And Fi designed the battery management around motion and context: the Ultra’s battery is managed by machine learning that conserves power when the dog is home or asleep, then activates everything the moment one goes missing. The product is effectively engineered around the reality that “continuous tracking” is expensive in battery terms, so it tries to wait quietly for the exact moment the LTE connection would otherwise fail.

The launch lands at a particularly telling moment for the pet wearable market. Tractive, Fi’s Austrian rival, crossed $100 million in ARR in 2024 and, last August, acquired pet wearable company Whistle. Then Tractive immediately shut down the product line, locking thousands of devices overnight and leaving displaced users with nowhere obvious to go. That sequence matters because it highlights what can happen when the category consolidates and customers end up holding hardware that stops working. Fi’s move to a differentiated connectivity method is not just about performance. It’s also about capturing the trust that gets damaged when competitors change direction and leave users stranded.

Fi, for its part, has been scaling quietly in the background. Fortune reports that the company has raised $45 million total, with its Series B led by Longview Asset Management. It has also expanded to 38 countries over the past year, and is now “dropping its most differentiated product into the gap.” The company expects to cross $100 million ARR this year. That revenue target is important for decision-makers watching scaling mechanics. It signals that Fi believes it can grow fast enough to justify both distribution and ongoing support, while also betting that Starlink-enabled connectivity is a compelling differentiator that consumers will pay for, not just a feature they will ignore.

Zoom out and the market tailwind is real, according to the figures in Fortune. Pet wearables are projected to be a $3.8 billion industry in 2026, growing to $11.4 billion by 2033. The reported driver is Americans having kids later and spending accordingly on dogs first, which reframes pet ownership as a longer, higher-intent consumer relationship. If that demand keeps rising, then the “last mile” problem of connectivity becomes less of an edge case and more of a reputation problem. People will forgive a tracker that occasionally glitches, but they will not forgive one that goes dark when it matters.

For Bensamoun, the Starlink Ultra is tied to a stated thesis: erasing the “compromise between freedom and safety” with technology. The strategic takeaway for peers is straightforward, even if you are not in pet wearables. When a product depends on network coverage, the user experience is only as good as the weakest signal. Fi is betting that satellite connectivity can change the math of reliability, and that reliability can translate into pricing power, ARR momentum, and reduced churn. In a category where competitors have already shown they can shut off devices overnight, “staying connected” is not a nice-to-have. It is the product.