Michael Hurnaus | Founder & CEO of Tractive
Michael Hurnaus, founder and CEO of Tractive, shares how a personal moment led to building the world’s leading pet GPS platform—scaling past $100M in recurring revenue, tracking 1.5M+ pets globally, bootstrapping for eight years, and expanding from GPS tracking into predictive pet health.
We speak with Michael Hurnaus, the founder and CEO of Tractive, the world’s leading GPS tracker for pets.
In this conversation, we discuss the origin story of Tractive, how the team reached over $100 million in annual recurring revenue, now tracks more than 1.5 million pets globally, bootstrapped for eight years before raising $35 million, expanded from GPS into predictive pet health, and successfully scaled from Europe into the U.S. market.\
How did you initially come up with the idea for Tractive, and what problem were you personally trying to solve?
The idea for Tractive was born out of a very personal experience back in 2012 while I was living in Cupertino. A friend’s dog had escaped through the backyard door, and four of us spent nearly two hours combing the neighborhood to find him.
Thankfully, we did—but the stress of not knowing where he was made a deep impression on me. Given that we were all tech-savvy people, we naturally asked ourselves: “Why isn’t there a device that can show a pet’s live location on a map?”
We did some research and were surprised to discover that nothing like this really existed yet. The very next day, I made the bold decision to leave my role at Amazon, and within weeks, I moved back to Austria to start what would eventually become Tractive.
I’ll admit I was a bit naive about how hard it would be, but I was incredibly fortunate to have two outstanding co-founders—coincidentally, both named Michael as well—who shared the vision and helped bring it to life.
Fast forward to today, Tractive is the global market leader in GPS tracking for pets. We’ve built a successful, scalable business operating out of Austria and helping millions of pet parents around the world keep their furry friends safe.
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