Wuf: / whereE: Boulder / web: www.gclwuf.com / founded: 2013.

• Position: TECH START UP - Company overview

Initial Lightbulb:

WOF co-founder and CEO Sean Kelly grew up with dogs and invisible fences. Now he's looking to take the concept into the 21st century.

After getting an MBA from Thunderbird School of Global Management in Phoenix, Kelly was spurred to start the company and a family dog got loose and was killed by a car. "That prompted this back to the forefront." he says. "After we lost our dog through very avoidable circumstances, I saw it as something that needed to happen--and I needed to do it."

He entered the company into the Boomtown accelerator program in March 2014 and relocated to Colorado. "''m setting up shop," he says. "I brought my family here."

There are two employees in Boulder and a "distributed" software development team, says Kelly. "For a while there, we were operating across six time zones, from Portland to Paris to Pakistan."

In a Nutshell:

WOF is making a wearable, Bluetooth-enabled device for dogs that tracks location, barking and behavior and pairs with a mobile app that connects best friends by smartphone.

"The on-collar device is the hardware in our hardware-software ecosystem," he explains. The software "is a whole new concept for dog training."

The latter utilizes crowdsourcing and reflects a variety of training styles. Kelly compares the WOF model to that of Pittsburgh startup Duolingo for translation: People get language lessons that ultimately translate documents and websites. "We're like the Duolingo for dog training," he explains. "We offer a gamified...