Meet the Humans Behind PAHI: Why Animalystix Is Building This in Kolkata
Abhinandan Banerjee
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September 25, 2026
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2 min read
Every time someone asks where Animalystix is based, we get to say something most Indian tech founders don’t: Kolkata. Not Bengaluru, not Gurugram — Kolkata. And honestly, once you understand what we’re building, it makes a strange kind of sense.
Why Kolkata, Of All Places?
India’s pet care market crossed roughly ₹30,000 crore (about $3.6 billion) in 2024 and is projected to grow at nearly 20% a year through 2032. Most of that growth story gets told through Mumbai and Delhi. But Kolkata has something those cities can’t manufacture: a deep bench of hardware engineers, a century-old culture of jugaad problem-solving, and — crucially — a huge, chaotic, deeply loved street dog population that taught our founders what “pet safety” actually means before it was a business plan.
The Three Teams Making PAHI Real
Building a smart collar isn’t one job, it’s three fighting for the same 40 grams of space around a dog’s neck. Our IoT development team handles the GPS and connectivity that keeps a collar talking to your phone even when the network drops. Our data science and AI team trains Dotty AI — the system behind PAHI’s health and behavior alerts — which needs a full 14-day calibration period per pet just to learn what “normal” looks like for your specific dog or cat. And our hardware prototyping team obsesses over things like the hollow-belt chassis and titanium anti-cut weave, because a GPS tracker that gets chewed through in a week is just an expensive paperweight.
Built By Pet Parents, For Pet Parents
Almost everyone on the Animalystix Kolkata team has a dog or cat waiting for them at home — some of them former street dogs themselves. That’s not a marketing line, it’s why the charge-pin safety lock exists at all: someone on this team had a pet nearly hurt itself on a charging port, and refused to ship a collar with that flaw again. When you’re building hardware that sits on an animal that can’t tell you when something’s wrong, that kind of first-hand stubbornness matters more than any spec sheet.
So yes — Animalystix Kolkata. Same city as the Victoria Memorial and the trams, now also home to the team trying to make sure your dog never goes missing without you knowing within seconds.
