Silicon Valley Pet AI Company Traini Raises Over $7.14 Million to Accelerate AI Smart Collar Mass Production
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Silicon Valley pet AI startup Traini raised over $7 million to mass-produce its AI-powered smart collar, which uses multimodal models to interpret pet emotions and enable “near real-time” human-pet dialogue.
Silicon Valley pet emotion intelligence company Traini recently announced the completion of a financing round exceeding 50 million RMB (approximately over $7.14 million USD, 1 USD ≈ 7.0 CNY). The funds will be primarily used for multimodal emotion model R&D, software/hardware product iteration, and overseas market expansion.
This round was led by Banyan Tree, Silver Capital, ZhaoTai Group, and NYX Ventures, with follow-on investments from Strating Gate Fund, Jade Capital, and several tech investors. Existing shareholders Tao Foundation and Xiaomi co-founder Hong Feng continued their support. Prior to this, the company had received personal investments from executives at companies like Google and Meta, and completed an angel round in May 2023.
Traini focuses on applying multimodal generative AI to pet behavior understanding and "translation," aiming to enable near real-time voice dialogue between humans and pets. Its core software product is the Pet Empathic Behavior Interface (PEBI), which estimates a pet's psychological state by analyzing its sounds, expressions, and behaviors, outputting results in a conversational format. The model currently covers nearly 120 dog breeds, with internal test emotion translation accuracy reaching up to 94%. PEBI is offered as an API to pet clinics and smart hardware manufacturers.
Post-financing, Traini plans to accelerate the mass production of its first generative AI hardware product—the Cognitive Smart Collar—which is now available for pre-order on its website. The collar features Traini's self-developed Valence–Arousal (VA) emotion model, trained on over 900 research papers and behavioral data from approximately 2 million dogs. It analyzes signals like heart rate, body temperature, movement, and vocalizations to provide users with an emotional and health profile.
To support its technology, Traini has also developed a 3D pet emotion model and has built a high-quality pet audio-video dataset. The company employs lightweight and edge deployment strategies to improve response efficiency and privacy security.
On the user side, Traini claims its services have reached over 200 million pet dogs globally, with related YouTube videos exceeding 60 million views. Its 2023 product PetGPT reportedly achieved a usage rate of over 99% among covered users, and the 2024 release T-Agent enables automated product searches and orders based on perceived pet needs. Traini has established partnerships with nearly 40,000 local pet stores in the U.S.
Source：36Kr
