Tractive wins GlobalPETS Forum Award
The Austrian pet tech company follows in the footsteps of 2023 award winner Snellman to take home this annual prize.
GPS tracking and wellness monitoring platform Tractive has won this year’s GlobalPETS Forum Award, a prize given yearly to a company that has demonstrated exceptional performance, for its GPS-tracking and health and activity-monitoring platform for cats and dogs.
Digitalizing the pet industry
The judges selected the Austrian company from other nominees, including Kormotech, Laroy Group, Earth Rated and Vet Planet.
“Receiving this recognition is fantastic,” says Tractive CEO Michael Hurnaus after being given the prize during the GlobalPETS Forum 2024 in Venice. “We’re very excited that the pet industry is becoming increasingly digital.”
Tractive’s GPS device is aimed at showing pet parents their pet’s movements and health patterns through an app. “When cats and dogs get lost, they could return in a few hours. But it’s a very long time for pet owners, and that’s what we set out to solve,” notes Hurnaus. US animal welfare organization American Humane estimates that 1 in 3 pets become lost at some point in their lifetimes. Additionally, more than 80% of missing pets are never found.
Business model
In 2023, Tractive brought in €87 million ($93.92M) in revenue – 45% more than the year before – and 1 million subscribers.
The company’s services are split into 2 purchases: the tracker device (costing from $/€49.99) and the app subscription – $96 (€84) per year – which gives customers access to their pet’s movements, wellness score, predictive health alerts and the activity/sleep monitoring feature. While Hurnaus points out that it loses money on the device, the business generates revenue through the monthly subscriptions that pet parents pay.
Customer centricity is key to Tractive’s success in a very competitive market. The company has a team dedicated to customer care and collecting feedback to develop its products and services.
“For us, the prioritization is to make the product first, even if the product is more expensive, even if we don’t sell as many as we would like, we want to ensure the product quality is the best,” says Hurnaus.
A winning idea
Founded in 2012, Tractive released its first GPS tracker in 2013. At this point, the device could only monitor a dog’s movements.
The idea for a pet GPS came from Hurnaus’ experience. “A friend of mine lost his dog. He called me to help find him,” he explains, adding that while searching, he couldn’t believe there wasn’t a product and app that allowed dog owners to track their pet on their phone. “So, I had the idea to create the device and found two co-founders. And that’s kind of the root of how it started,” Hurnaus states.
Between 2016 and 2022, the company focused on collecting data, growing sales and opening new offices in Austria, Germany, the UK and, more recently, the US. Tractive has 230 employees from 40 countries across the globe.
A fundamental shift
2023 was a year of change for Tractive when it added a new feature to detect when a cat or dog is not feeling very well, thanks to artificial intelligence (AI).
“We brought this feature out a few months ago silently,” the CEO says. “The only thing we did was, using our data, send an email to the customer whose pet was having a problem – just a plain, straightforward email telling them about it – and the feedback that we have received was tremendous.”
The company has been using AI for multiple years, but since the launch of ChatGPT, its usage has expanded to identify health issues, hardware failures and network coverage problems.
New opportunities
Lastly, Hurnaus explains that, with only 0.4% of dog and 0.1% of cat owners as customers, Tractive still has massive market penetration opportunities to cover. This would include using activity and health data to upsell food and supplements.
This is not something the company currently does, but Hurnaus says it’s open to the possibilities. “This shows a few opportunities we and anyone could do with data, such as upselling certain supplements when your dog doesn’t sleep well.”
He concludes: “It is also possible to verify how well a supplement works; why not? We have companies that use our products exactly for purposes like this.”
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