Verizon's App Is Now a Pet-Tech Storefront

A phone carrier's family-safety app now sells dog trackers. Fi's Mini GPS collar is embedded directly inside Verizon's redesigned Family app as of this week, sold at a member-exclusive price alongside real-time location sharing for kids, teens, and other family members.

Fi Mini now sells inside Verizon's Family app

Fi and Verizon announced the integration on August 4th. The Fi Mini tracker now sits inside Verizon's Family app on a single dashboard alongside human family members, with safe-zone alerts and activity monitoring available in the same interface used for kids and teens. Verizon postpaid customers can buy the Fi Mini through the app at an exclusive member price, not disclosed in the announcement. Fi cofounder and CEO Jonathan Bensamoun framed it simply: pets are family, and technology built for families now includes them.

Why this is Fi's fourth carrier tie-up, not its first

Here's what the announcement doesn't say: Fi Mini already runs on Verizon's own cellular network, independent of this app deal. Fi's Series 2, 3, and 3+ trackers already run on AT&T's LTE-M network, a partnership Fi's own support documentation describes as making Fi the first tracking device to use that network. Fi Ultra, which launched in July, runs on T-Mobile's T-Satellite service built on Starlink, letting a collar keep transmitting location past cellular range entirely. Add Verizon's app-store placement and that's four separate carrier or satellite infrastructure relationships in Fi's stack, not one.

That pattern is the actual story. Fi doesn't build its own network. It attaches itself to whichever carrier's infrastructure solves the next connectivity gap, then turns that connectivity into a reason to keep paying the membership fee. The Verizon deal is a different kind of move than the AT&T or T-Mobile ones, distribution and storefront placement rather than raw network access, but it's the same underlying strategy: borrow a bigger company's infrastructure and reach instead of building it.

That strategy matters more for a company Fi's size, competing in a pet wearables category that runs roughly $3.8 billion in 2026 and is projected to reach $11.4 billion by 2033. Fi has raised roughly $41 million to $45 million across disclosed rounds and told Fortune in July it expects to cross $100 million in annual recurring revenue this year. Its most direct rival, Tractive, was acquired by Bending Spoons in a deal valued in the high hundreds of millions of euros and already claims more than 900,000 paying subscribers, well ahead of Fi's disclosed scale. Getting featured inside a major carrier's own family-safety app, used by tens of millions of subscribers already trained to open it daily, is a materially cheaper acquisition channel than performance ads, and it reaches exactly the household-safety-minded buyer Fi is chasing.

What carrier-app distribution could mean for pet tech

Watch whether Verizon extends this pattern to other connected-device categories inside the Family app, which would turn carrier apps into a genuine retail channel for hardware accessories beyond phones. Watch whether Fi's rivals, Tractive under Bending Spoons or Life360's Jiobit, pursue their own carrier placement deals in response. And watch whether Fi discloses any lift in Mini sales or app downloads tied to the integration on its next funding update, since that's the number that will tell whether carrier-app distribution is actually a cheaper acquisition channel or just another item on an already long partnerships list.

Source: Fi via Business Wire