Losing a pet can be traumatic, most people with a pet consider it to be part of the family. But you were smart, you put a microchip in your pet so when your dog or cat is found it will easily be tracked down.

Not so fast.

It turns out, there are a dozen or so microchip companies on the market, all with their own scanners and data collection systems. And because there’s no standardization in the United States, the likelihood of your pet winding up at a facility that can properly scan the chip is pretty low.

That’s the problem Michael Hamilton came across when he bought his dog, Peeva. So Michael quit his day job and got to work on developing a universal scanner that can ready any microchip embedded in a pet so facilities have better access to the important data that they contain.