Ever wonder what your dog actually does all day? (Spoiler: nap, window patrol, nap, suspicious squirrel, nap.) The Ouren M1 wants to show you. It is a paw-shaped collar camera with a wide-angle lens at your pet’s eye level, plus GPS, Bluetooth, an AI pet diary and a Lost Mode that pulls up a live view if your dog goes missing. It is crowdfunding on Indiegogo for $259 through October 30, with a planned $399 retail price and shipping estimated for mid-December 2026.
Your dog’s-eye view, minus the sniffing
Most pet trackers tell you where your dog is. The M1 is pitched as showing you what your dog sees: the backyard patrol, the mail carrier standoff and the 45-minute stare at a closed door. Instead of streaming all day like a home camera, Ouren says it grabs short clips of the good stuff and its app turns them into daily recaps, pet diaries and highlight reels. It can also flag unusual changes in activity, though Ouren is clear that it is not a medical device.
Lost Mode
This is the feature that could earn its keep. If your pet bolts, the app can request a live camera view of where it is, so a recognizable corner, fence or storefront can help you narrow the search. That view is paired with an outdoor GPS area, Bluetooth proximity when you get close and a flashing LED to spot your escape artist in the bushes. Ouren itself says this is a search assist, not pinpoint tracking.
Claimed specs
- Camera: 5 MP sensor with a 120-degree wide-angle lens
- Connectivity: GPS/GNSS, Bluetooth 5.4, Wi-Fi 6 and a built-in eSIM for 4G
- Battery: 1,050 mAh, rated around 48 hours per charge, with a magnetic pogo-pin charger
- Size and storage: about 50 g with 32 GB of storage and a 6-axis motion sensor
- Social: when two M1 pets meet, owners can tap to swap contacts and log the new friend
Crowdfunding reality check
The M1 is a crowdfunding campaign, not a finished product on a store shelf. Every spec, feature and ship date above is the maker’s claim, and Ouren’s own site says battery life, waterproofing and connectivity are still being validated before production. Ouren also says its images are for reference only and the final device may look different. Backing a campaign is not the same as buying something: you are funding a project that can slip, change or fail to deliver. As of October 20 the campaign had raised $3,312 of its $5,000 goal from 15 backers. If you back it, back it with money you could live without.
Collar-gate: the drama
Every crowdfunding campaign needs a plot twist, and this one showed up early. Yihang Mao, who says he is a founder of Auren (the project’s name before it became Ouren) and is now in a dispute with the team, has been waving people off on LinkedIn. In a September 8 post, he says there is “no working, integrated prototype,” that the full device-to-app workflow “has not been implemented” and that the demos “rely on AI-generated visuals and editing.” His September 14 follow-up skips the subtlety: “NO WORKING DEMO? DON’T PAY.”
Before anyone grabs a pitchfork (or a chew toy): these are one person’s claims, made in the middle of an internal dispute, and we could not confirm any of them. We also could not find any public response from Ouren on its website, its blog or anywhere else we looked. In fairness to Ouren, its own site already says the specs are not final and describes its app screens as “real screens” shown with sample content. What we did not find is an uncut, start-to-finish demo of a real M1 doing its thing. That is the fix for all of this: one continuous video of a real collar on a real dog, capturing footage that lands in the app. Until real hands-on demos and independent reviews show up, keep your $259 on a short leash.
GadgetKing take
We love the idea. Every dog owner has come home to a shredded pillow and wanted the footage, and a Lost Mode that shows you the actual street corner beats a GPS dot with a 50-foot circle of shame. But a tiny collar cam with GPS, LTE, Wi-Fi, AI and a two-day battery is a very tall order for a small team, and the campaign is still mostly promises and renders. Put it on the watch list, not the wish list, until real units are strapped to real dogs. Your dog’s secret life will stay secret a little longer. Probably for the best.
Where to get it
The Ouren M1 (listed on Indiegogo as Ouren Memory One) is not sold on ourenpet.com. The only way to get one right now is to back the Indiegogo campaign at $259, which runs through October 30, 2026, with a planned $399 retail price later and shipping estimated for mid-December 2026. Remember, that is a pledge, not a purchase. Back the Ouren M1 on Indiegogo.
Sources: Ouren, Ouren via PR Newswire and Gadget Flow. Video: Gadget Flow.
More gadgets for the good boys: the Starlink dog tracking collar and, from the GadgetKing vault, the original Pet’s Eye View Camera.
