Founder and CEO of Pixoo Amine Bouyoucef (center) with COO Genki Shiozawa (left) and CTO Si-Mohamed Lamraoui.

“I was coming back from school. I passed the police station and about 10 minutes after I went by, a bomb exploded… there were a lot of victims.”

Amine Bouyoucef grew up during the “Black Decade” in Algeria. The north African country was caught in a civil war. “The population was a hostage of these two parties fighting each other. There was a lot of killing, a lot of blood.” The violence cost the lives of an estimated 200,000 civilians.

“When you are a kid, you don’t really feel that heaviness. You are just playing football with your neighborhood friends.”

Little entrepreneur

Amine comes from a well educated family where his parents stressed the importance of studying. In the midst of all that, he was a little entrepreneur.

“We would go to real estate agencies, make them a free website, and host their listings.” In 2004 Amine and his older brother were looking for some side money while going to school. “The first question we got asked was, ‘What’s a website?’” explains Amine. “That failed,” he laughs.

Amine’s late cat, Pixoo.

In another gig the brothers put advertisements on the sides of buses. Each bus brought in about US$1,000 and the two ran a network of 75. “That’s like crazy money in Algeria,” Amine laughs. “We didn’t expect it to be super profitable for a summer project.”

A year later, Amine would use the money to fly across the world. “It was my seed funding for my new Japanese life.”

After completing his Masters in Algeria, he moved to Japan to get a Ph.D.

Tokyo times

Amine settled into his Japanese apartment.

“I was very busy. In Algeria, I always had Pixoo my cat. I grew up with pets and then after coming to Japan, I found myself alone in my very tiny room. I was lonely, without any company.” After buying the iPhone 3, an idea struck. “I thought it would be good to have a machine that would show you your pet, let you talk and feed them.”

Amine started to implement on the idea in late 2014 and met his co-founder who has a Ph.D. in computer science in the beginning of 2015. The two bootstrapped out of their apartments and conducted interviews with 100 pet owners.

There are 22 million dogs and cats in Japan.

“We learned that people care a lot about their pets,” says Amine. “I didn’t expect people to care so much about their pet’s health. I mean, it’s not like I didn’t care about my pet’s weight, but how much Pixoo weighed wasn’t my first concern.”

“Japanese people absolutely love their pets and consider them children. It’s the second biggest pet industry worldwide. There are 22 million dogs and cats in Japan.”

With a prototype auto pet-feeder in the works, the duo attended Tech in Asia’s 2015 Tokyo conference.

“I think for foreign founders in Asia, it’s a very good source of information,” Amine says of the conference. “We didn’t have any contacts in Asia but we met many entrepreneurs, founders, and investors through the ‘speed dating,’ including our first investor.”

In loving memory

With funding secured and after a new member joined, the three pet lovers incorporated Pixoo, named after Amine’s late cat, early this year.

“I created this to see him. I only thought it would be fair to pay homage.”

The final device is a connected pet auto-feeder and monitoring tool. Pet owners can use an app to schedule eating times remotely as well as see and talk to their pet through a camera and mic. A sensor in the machine alerts owners when food is running low and future updates will allow users to order food or other services through the app.

“Manufacturing is lined up. Everything is ready to go,” says Amine. To help pay for the first batch of auto-feeders, the team has started a campaign on Japanese crowdfunding site MotionGallery. Currently they are 30 percent of the way to their US$50,000 goal.

“We are very optimistic about getting it right. Hopefully the campaign will be successful and we can press that button to start industrial production.”

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