The dog this is named for

Where the name comes from

A halo is something that watches from above. That is the whole of the pun, and it is not really a pun — an aircraft holding a pattern over a neighbourhood at four in the morning, looking for somebody's animal in the dark, is doing the thing the name describes.

So the name is not a brand exercise. It was decided before there was a company to attach it to, and it is the reason the work is what it is rather than a general drone business that happens to take pet jobs.

What it turned into

The technology that finds a missing animal was not built for animals. Thermal imaging of this class exists because public safety agencies needed to find people — at night, in weather, in terrain, when time is the thing that runs out first. It is expensive, it is genuinely good, and almost none of it was ever pointed at somebody's dog.

That is the entire idea here: take equipment built to save human lives and apply it to the ones sitting on the sofa. A missing pet is not a lesser emergency to the household it happens to, and the fact that the same afternoon of grief gets a professional response in one case and a flashlight in the other was never a technical limit. It was just where nobody had bothered to point the equipment.

Her pack

The dedication says she watches over her pack. This is the pack: Max, Apollo and Gaia, all three of them rescues, none of them found by a drone. They are here because they are the reason the phone gets answered at two in the morning by somebody who understands what the call is about.

• 

  Max

  Originally a board-and-train. His owner was unable to keep him.

• 

  Apollo

  Dumped, and rescued at three months old.

• 

  Gaia

  Found in an abandoned litter.