Pet Tech Boom Creates New Business Opportunities for Innovative Startups

Small business takeaway:

• The pet-tech boom shows how founders can turn consumers’ emotional pain points into scalable companies. Halo Collar replaced cumbersome wire fencing for dogs with GPS-enabled smart collars and app-based training; Zoom Room made dog training a recurring community experience; Bark Air stretched a product brand into premium pet travel services. The broader lesson: durable growth comes from solving neglected problems, pairing technology with trust, and building offerings customers return to repeatedly.

Gen Z American pet owners spend an average of $6,103 annually on their pets and millennials $5,150, while boomers’ spending pales in comparison, at just $2,454, according to a Harris Poll. Driving those figures are millennial and Gen Z pet owners who are more willing to invest in tech-forward, membership-based experiential products and services designed to enhance their pets’ quality of life. 

Meanwhile, the pet industry has historically been underserved by technology, leaving room for inventive entrepreneurs to fill in the gaps in areas like travel, nutrition, and health monitoring. 

New brands are creating recurring offerings for their customers that build community and create loyalty via tech: Halo Collar keeps dogs safe with its GPS pet-tracking subscription app; Zoom Room pet parents purchase memberships and classes that build dogs’ social and emotional development; and Bark Air refuses to put pets in airplane cargo like luggage and instead serves its furry customers with in-flight tailored, premium concierge services.

As these brands build momentum, the U.S. pet services industry is projected to climb to $165 billion through 2026, according to the American Pets Products Association. 

Halo Collar: From family tragedy to a $75 million pet GPS fencing business

Engineer and entrepreneur Ken Ehrman founded Halo Collar after a family tragedy: his niece’s dog, Ruby, escaped through a traditional invisible fence, which requires putting physical wires in the ground, and was hit by a car. 

Ehrman’s consumer pet-tech company, founded alongside his brother Michael and famed dog trainer César Millán, star of the former National Geographic reality TV series “Dog Whisperer with César Millán,” is growing rapidly nearly a decade later.

The company combines installation-free smart fencing, GPS tracking, and app-based behavior training to keep dogs safe outside. Dogs hear a beep or feel a vibration when they approach the device’s virtual boundary, and training prevents them from crossing it. The brand scaled rapidly from $3 million in revenue in 2020 to $75 million in 2024, and it keeps over 200,000 dogs of 350 breeds safe, the company said.

“The invisible fence is really one of the last wire products out there,” Ehrman said, with GPS proliferating. “People could grasp that idea easily, and they could see the potential of our product,” meaning both consumers and investors easily grasped the clear distinction between the more outdated wire fencing and more modern GPS technology. 

Ehrman began by discovering people were searching for the term “invisible fence” on Google over 500,000 times a month. “You’re not really searching that term unless you’re looking to buy, so we knew there a was definite demand,” he said. 

He calculated the often-complicated-for-consumers, multi-step process of buying an invisible fence: gathering installation quotes, getting wire installed—which alone could total $1,500 and up—and dog training. “It had all the makings of an industry that could be disrupted through tech,” he said.

Three months later, Ehrman filed a patent application to protect his idea and started looking for a brand ambassador, a dog expert, to fine-tune and help promote his product. 

Halo Collar launched direct-to-consumer. Now, it’s sold online at Walmart, Amazon, Best Buy, Chewy, and Scheels. 

Ehrman says it’s critical for today’s brands to have an omnichannel approach, a strategy he’s working on. “You want to be at the right place when people are making their purchasing decisions,” he said, including at the shops where new pet owners go in-person to buy initial supplies. “You have to get in front of them.”

[Read more: How Halo Collar Scaled to $100 Million as Demand Surges for Smart Pet Safety Technology]

Zoom Room: Building a ‘Gymboree for dogs’ into a national franchise

Like Halo Collar Founder Ehrman, dog lover and Early Childhood Education Specialist Mark Van Wye launched Zoom Room to solve a business problem in the pet services industry that was bugging him: doggy day cares didn’t always spark joy for pet owners.

Running a doggy day care came with serious drawbacks, too: heavy upfront investment, complicated construction and buildout, and constant liability exposure if an animal got injured or fell ill. “It’s such a rough business to start,” Van Wye said.

Nearly two decades ago, he imagined a dog-centered business lower in liability that would benefit dogs while bonding them to their humans. 

“My idea was a kind of a Gymboree for dogs,” or a place where dogs would learn and play alongside their humans, he said, referring to the iconic child development play classes for babies and toddlers. “Something that’s more of a lifestyle ritual.” Now, as CEO of dog training franchise Zoom Room, he’s building a membership-based lifestyle brand for dog training and socializing.

Zoom Room specializes in dog agility, and the franchise business has grown rapidly, to more than 57 locations across the United States. It gamifies dog training, with owners using agility courses and games like tic tac toe and musical chairs to teach dogs sitting and heeling. The focus is on empowering owners, brain stimulation, fun, and building community. 

Like a yoga studio, customers buy class packs or a recurring membership. Dogs and their owners socialize through playgroups, parties, and even “doggy disco” nights. It’s a model that leans into the trend of consumers favoring experiences and continuing to spend on services that offer social and emotional payoff like wellness memberships and pet care programs, even as they drop discretionary purchases.

“I’m really passionate about pet socialization, and that drives lot of our decision making,” Van Wye said. “It’s a very good north star for us.”

He first launched a proof of concept with a single store in Culver City, California, a city brimming with media and tech professionals, young residents with dogs, and ample disposable income. Two years later, he started franchising. 

“Then, we just started learning our way through the franchising model,” Van Wye said. Zoom Room jumped from nine locations in 2020 to 60 by early 2024. It found that in first eight weeks alone, each Zoom Room customer was bringing in an average of $679, over ten times the $63 cost to acquire them. 

As Van Wye works toward his goal of 500 locations by 2030, he’s brought franchising experts onto his leadership team, including Don Allen, who got his start in franchising with Orangetheory Fitness as Vice President of Operations. 

“We want Zoom Room to be synonymous with dog training,” he said.

As dog owners increasingly make decisions such as where to have a beer with friends, based on the location’s dog policy and accessibility, he wants Zoom Room to be “the architect of what good dog behavior is” and help set standards for businesses that welcome in peoples’ four-legged friends.

He envisions a medallion for dogs who spend a certain number of hours training at Zoom Room, a clearance of sorts that businesses could rely on to ensure that the dogs they allow in are well-behaved and safe to be around customers.

[Read more: How Dog Training Disruptor Zoom Room Became One of the Fastest-Growing Service Franchises]

Bark Air: Turning a ‘no pets in cargo’ model into a premium travel brand 

For over a decade, pet products brand Bark focused on delivering customized toy and treat subscription boxes to pets and creating personalized nutrition and meal plans. It landed its toys and treats in more than 33,000 stores, including Target, and grew into a $102.9 million business in 13 years.

Bark kept hearing from customers that long-distance travel with pets is uncomfortable and complicated. Then Cofounder and Chief Executive Officer Matt Meeker decided to tackle the lingering gap in pet care that was also personal: He wanted to travel long distances with his Great Dane Hugo but wouldn’t subject his best friend to the cold, noisy cargo hold in the belly of an airplane. Bark expanded in 2024 with a solution: Bark Air.

The airline for dogs (cats and birds are welcome, too) and their owners strives to make air travel with pets more of a VIP experience. Since its launch with service from the New York area to Los Angeles and London, Bark Air expanded to flights to cities including Paris, Lisbon, Madrid, Seattle, Florida, and San Francisco, carrying over 1,000 dogs and their owners. The first 10 months of business in 2024 generated revenue north of $6 million.

“Our motto is to make all dogs happy,” President of Bark Air Mike Novotny said. “And we can’t do that only through products, we have to do it through services as well.”

Along the way, Bark Air has found success with a multipronged marketing campaign that leaned on social media, including one video that went viral: Meeker locked himself in a large dog carrier and flew from South Florida to New York in the plane’s hold.

“Word of mouth really built,” said Novotny. “People gravitated to the fact that we were trying to solve a really challenging problem. We had a great set of early adopters who believed in what we were doing and needed this service. That helped us to get going.”

The brand doesn’t own its own planes and instead partners with airline operators, and from the start positioned itself as a hospitality service. During the flight, dogs get customized goody bags and snacks. An on-board concierge team includes vet techs.

The stand-alone concierge service, Companion Concierge, helps pet owners during relocation or extended stay travel and caters to travel needs. For example, the service offers vetted recommendations for dog-friendly hotels and local vet recommendations, and it’s available to anyone—not just customers who fly Bark Air.

“A Bark Air flight is too expensive for some people,” acknowledged Novotny, with one-way tickets for a single dog and its human averaging around $8,900 on routes from New York to London. “But we can still provide great service for people. Our concierge service has big market appeal, and it allows us to serve customers outside of Bark Air,” he said. “Interest in the service has been strong.”

[Read more: How Bark Air Is Transforming Travel With Dogs Amid the Booming Pet Economy]

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