In a world where everything is becoming connected and quantified, dogs, cats and even horses won’t be spared. Connecting and quantifying animals isn’t new for Kitchener-Waterloo startup Konectera. The company launched CLEO Collar back in 2013 to keep tabs on smaller animals like dogs and cats and have recently introduced a new product, SeeHorse, to monitor and track horses.
Konectera is not structured like your typical startup. The company oversees multiple startups holding the IP, legal rights and equity across all of them. CEO Peter Mankowski calls it the “mothership” and both CLEO Collar and SeeHorse are the first of two startups under the corporation. For now, the mothership is focused on wearable technology for pets, but Mankowski told BetaKit that human wearables are being considered. The Konectera website positions the company as an “industry leader in machine to machine communication” using cloud-based sensor management platforms to service the pet, medical, first responder and other industrial applications. In March of this year, Konectera became one of seventeen companies accepted in the first Accelerator Centre (AC) JumpStart cohort, receiving $30,000 in seed capital and mentorship.
Mankowski’s second startup, SeeHorse, on the other hand, is already selling its product to the public, being much further along than CLEO Collar despite only being launched a couple of months ago. Mankowski told us that SeeHorse’s traction is due to work already done with CLEO Collar, along with an undisclosed round of investment received by Konectera provided specifically to get SeeHorse into the market.
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