Over 15 years ago, my girlfriend's cat disappeared. We searched for weeks – in vain. Back then there was no tracker truly made for cats. So we started building one ourselves.
15 years ago, my girlfriend's cat disappeared. We searched for weeks – but we never found him.
I started looking for a GPS tracker for cats. I thought: "There has to be something that actually works."
There was nothing. Every "cat tracker" was really a miniaturised dog tracker. Too big. Too heavy. Battery dead after a day or two. (That's still true today.)
So I decided to build my own.
At first the goal was modest: a tracker that actually works for cats – small, light, with several days of battery life.
We raised capital and launched a successful crowdfunding campaign in 2016. Within a few months we had hundreds of pre-orders. But the real work had only just begun.
Trees, buildings, obstacles: gaps everywhere. And indoors, GPS stops working altogether. Walls block the signal completely.
That wasn't a small flaw – but we found a solution: radio technology. Radio waves pass through walls where GPS fails. We just had to combine the two into a real rescue system.
Every manufacturer told us the same thing: "It can't be done." So we built our own manufacturing – in Switzerland.
The response was immediate. Cat owners who had already tried everything else finally found something built specifically for cats. In 2020 we appeared on Germany's "Die Höhle der Löwen" (the German Shark Tank).
petTracer has offices in Switzerland and Germany. Every member of our team is trained to deliver fast, personal and knowledgeable support.
The best system. The best support team. That's why we built petTracer.
— Alan Ellenberger, Founder
petTracer 2.0 – Swiss Made, 34 g collar, GPS + radio, up to 30 days battery.
