2024: #2 Fastest Growing Private Company: SpotOn GPS Fence

Three-Year Average Annual Growth: 172%
Founded: 2015
Rank on Private 100: 78 
Headquarters: 7 Perimeter Road, Manchester
CEO: Paul Mangano
Total Number of Employees: 65
Product/Service: Designs and develops GPS fences for dog owners with large properties

A landscaper’s observation about how the underground wires in invisible dog fences often break led to the start of SpotOn GPS Fence in Manchester.

The landscaper shared his thought with his boss, entrepreneur Ken Solinsky, who thought there must be a better way to contain dogs. With his wife Grace, he founded SpotOn in 2015, bringing on company president Jennifer Kean in 2019 and CEO Paul Mangano in 2022 to help the enterprise grow.

Sung Vivathana, vice president of engineering, was behind the design of the firm’s product, which uses GPS to create a virtual fence that collects data from a dog’s collar, pinpointing the animal’s location. Customers use an app to draw a “fence” around the property where they want their dog contained and train their dog to respond to a warning noise as it reaches a boundary.

“Our innovation is you don’t have to install anything,” says Kean. “It takes a few minutes to set up and it’s completely portable… . There wasn’t a product on the market that was doing this.”A second-generation version of the product launched in 2022, with a more intuitive app and improved hardware making boundary lines more accurate, Kean says.

Some 65,000 units are in the field, she says, sold primarily on the company’s website or online via Amazon or chewy.com. The cost per unit is $999, and it works best on properties of at least a half-acre. The company is just starting to offer the product in retail stores, she adds.

Manufacturing and assembly is all done in NH, according to Kean, even though it poses a cost challenge compared to competitors who rely on overseas production. The company’s customer call center is also in the state.

She notes that SpotOn prides itself on being a good neighbor, and last year took a portion of its profits to award five grants to nonprofits devoted to animal welfare. “We want to keep giving back to the community,” she says.