Innovative start-up Petnet partners with Arrow IoT to power and help finance the second generation of their successful automated pet feeder.
The connected home has arrived. Smart thermostats and baby cams connected to smartphone apps have become mainstream and early adopters increasingly are learning new tricks to control their microwaves, refrigerators and other household devices with the aid of tech. Now we’re beginning to see an emerging class of niche products that leverage the Internet of Things (IoT) to improve lives in unique new ways. And not just people’s lives – the lives of their pets, too.
It’s no secret that many pet owners go to great lengths to pamper their furry companions. Last year, that sentiment translated to more than $66 billion in pet-related product revenue, according to the American Pet Products Association, with a growing piece of this market coming from emerging pet-technology products.
Building a “thinking marketplace” for pet owners
Petnet launched in 2013 with the vision of leveraging data collected from IoT technologies and Smart Home trends to create a smart marketplace that guides pet owners to more appropriate feeding decisions for their pets. “Our mission is to create a thinking marketplace capable of guiding pet owners to the best feeding decisions for their pets – and for that to scale, you need a lot of data,” says Petnet CEO Carlos Herrera.
Built on a bedrock of data, Petnet uses intelligent algorithms to provide pets the ideal pet food amount for their age, weight, level of activity, and breed. “Since every pet needs to eat every day, creating a feeding device like the SmartFeeder made the most sense for persistent data capture,” says Herrera.
The Petnet SmartFeeder is an automatic feeder for dogs and cats that enables pets to be fed while their owners are away. The product launched 18 months ago to enormous success: It already is sold in 80 countries and has dispensed more than 20 million feedings. And that’s just the tip of the potential iceberg, according to Herrera.
Pet owners use the Petnet smartphone app to schedule daily meals and portion sizes, manage feeding schedules and keep tabs on their pets’ eating habits. Most people tend to overfeed their pets; nearly 50% of pets are overweight or obese. By helping pet owners dispense the right amount of an appropriate food with controlled portions, the animal’s health improves and owners save money. In addition, Petnet can have a pet’s food delivered to their doorstep.
Big success brought along big challenges
The company spent two years getting all the pieces and infrastructure in place before launching the SmartFeeder in late 2015. “We’ve been on the market for less than two years and we’re in 80 countries with no lack of customers,” says Herrera. But Petnet also had several pain points with their version 1 solution relating to some of their initial partners’ reliability, scalability and costs.From a hardware and engineering standpoint, the biggest challenge was cost control – Petnet found that as a start-up building a new product for the first time, manufacturers were pricing high. “We started by ordering small quantities and vendors perceived us as risky, so they loaded the pricing up front,” explains Herrera.
Some of the company’s original technology partners were start-ups, and some had black-box systems that Petnet couldn’t access if something went wrong. Some initial vendors also had unreliable infrastructure, or they went out of business. If his company was going to continue to grow, Herrera recognized that he needed to eliminate these risks.
Petnet is managing the lives of beloved creatures, and if their system goes down, the company gets concerned phone calls within seconds. “With version 2, we wanted to improve our robustness, and that means having better partners, not just better technology. We decided that a substantial, established company would be a stronger partner for us – a partner that was already at scale."
On top of all that, Petnet learned quickly that financing a hardware supply chain is very expensive. As a start-up, Petnet was finding it difficult to negotiate advantageous terms with vendors. Herrera wanted a partner that believed in his company and would act as a financing adviser and partner.
After meeting a few satisfied Arrow customers – and then discovering Arrow’s full range of capabilities – Herrera chose Arrow as his partner to help solve these pain points. Arrow is an established, long-term leader in the electronics industry, and the company has a thriving IoT division.
Why Arrow? Arrow is at the crossroads of everything IoT
Arrow offers one of the industry’s most comprehensive end-to-end portfolios of IoT services, platforms, products and solutions. Considered an IoT solution aggregator and integrator, Arrow enables customers to pick and choose the right elements of technology and services to build their solutions via the company’s ecosystem of more than 850 partners.
Arrow unifies this broad ecosystem with Arrow Connect™ which serves as a universal ingestion layer to connect any sensor to any cloud and provide device management services delivered from a SaaS application.
Simply put, Arrow helps companies like Petnet bring IoT ideas to life. That’s why the two companies are partnering together to design and manufacture version 2 of the SmartFeeder. Version 2 will improve the accuracy and precision of the sensors and improved mechanical features to expand on the available foods which can be dispensed.
How exactly is Arrow helping Petnet?
Herrera has an extensive list.
First, Arrow’s design and sourcing has provided Petnet with unique expertise in developing low-cost solutions that can scale. Explains Herrera: “They helped us source a lot of the components and helped us design our board to minimize costs at scale. Arrow helped us source and negotiate the chip, and it is super affordable. They also gave us guidance on how to design our system to minimize costs in a way we never would have known to do ourselves.”
The Petnet solution has 37 layers of technology, from the chip to the e-commerce integrations. To manage all these connections, Petnet uses Arrow Connect, Arrow’s IoT platform providing technology-agnostic universal data ingestion from any device through any protocol to any cloud platform. Arrow Connect is embedded on the SmartFeeder chip as firmware. This creates a secure channel to manage Petnet’s data – whether coming upstream or downstream – including health and status data, and commands coming from a user’s app.
Arrow Connect provides Petnet with a fast and flexible way to securely provision and manage all their devices. It provides valuable over-the-air deployment of firmware, so Petnet can upgrade its SmartFeeders without any disruption or user-required action. Arrow Connect also provides high-level monitoring of the health and status of all Petnet devices.
Arrow’s help and services don’t stop there for Petnet, as the company’s Advanced Manufacturing Support Services (AMSS) group is now providing complete management of the SmartFeeder’s manufacturing and supply chain. From soup to nuts – sourcing components, assembly, logistics, reverse logistics – all of that is being supplied by Arrow. “Our costing is greatly improved as we leverage Arrow’s scale and purview,” explains Herrera, as well as their speed to market. “It also allows us to focus on our core strength, which is cognitive smart home commerce, not manufacturing.”
Arrow has a balance sheet that can support their customers, and Arrow helps Petnet finance many of their projects. “Our partnership with Arrow is deeply connected from engineering all the way up to financing,” says Herrera. “Arrow believes in our business and our business model – and is helping us become a much bigger customer.”
Arrow Electronics is a global provider of products, services and solutions to industrial and commercial users of electronic components and enterprise computing solutions. Arrow serves as a supply channel partner for more than 125,000 original equipment manufacturers, contract manufacturers and commercial customers through a global network of more than 465 locations serving over 90 countries.