Pupdate 11032024

much apaw but where are the pawprints? you must show for them to know

I’ve been scheming away on what is now dognosis for about 33 months now. What began as a flash of unadulterated insight is now so much more. It would have felt surreal except it’s as real as a puppy licking your face.

Anyways. A friend and one of the best founders I know nudged me to go back to working-in-public, if for nothing else other than the tactical/mercantile reason that we are looking for talented and curious people to join us on our mission and sending out bat-signals¹ , or long and complex search queries, through the intercomverse is one of the best ways to find them. So here’s some updates.

• I now have a co-founder! It has truly been one of the biggest blessings from last year’s dogyssey. Matt Clifford talks about how finding the right co-founder is like stepping on a landmine and meeting Itamar felt like that. It’s truly amazing how much having someone else all-in with you feels like multiple step-changes to going at it solo. We seem to work exceedingly well so far (knocks on wool) and get along swimmingly - we’re also housemates and am now blessed with regular doses of great salad.

• We are now an official official enterprise - we have legal entities and bank accounts in not one but two countries - a Delaware C-corp and an Indian Pvt Ltd. Sam Altman talks about how it’s best to keep a venture as a project for as long as possible because the officialness of a company makes things all boggy and bureaucratic. This is definitely true in my experience. But dognosis is much more than a project and the reality of money and people and commerce requires entities. Getting this all setup with the required compliance was actually a super long (relatively) and painful (relatively again) journey and once I recover from it sufficiently, I might attempt a post distilling it all down. Just FYI, if you’re based in India and thinking of using Stripe Atlas or the like to whip up a C-corp², you probably shouldn’t.

• We now are funded and have a treat-chest to keep us wagging our tail for the next 15-18 mos! We were really lucky with our fundraising, pitching a grand total of 4 times, and having 6 firms/people bite, the whole affair wrapping up in 5 zooms and a few emails/calls in less than a month. No complaints.

• We now have a physical space we can call our own, at least for the next 2 years! It’s 5000 odd square feet of land in South Bangalore that allows for a office-space, lab-space, spacious kennels, and a grassy yard. We’re aways from city central³ but it feels like a good fit and we have friends building drones as neighbours which is always nice (imagine the collab possibilities). Signing the rental agreement 3 months ago was one of the first “woah the paws have truly hit the road” moments and it’s all been getting realer ever since.

• We now are in possession of the necessary ethical committee (EC) approval to begin our research study on cancer-sniffing dogs! We have 3 hospitals in Hubli fully on-board and also have a great clinical team ironing out the wrinkles for sample collection to begin in full swing. We’re excited to have more hospitals join us for what we plan to be the largest breath-based multi-cancer screening study in the world.

There’s also a whole bunch of stuff that’s been happening under the hood and just an incredible amount of very diverse learnings to be done. I’ve read books/papers/essays on fundraising, cross-border compliance, Indian animal law, medical device and clinical trial regulations, epidemiological cancer screening, electrode design, LSTM approaches to EEG data, breath VOCs and artificial olfaction and a lot more. It’s been great - I’ve always loved cultivating broad and disparate pastures of knowledge, a la tumbling - though I do want to start honing in on a few select areas, especially ML and EEG cognitive neuroscience, over the next few weeks.

Oh, and yes, we are hiring for engineers and scientists. Tell your friends, especially if they like dogs (cat people are fine too).

Doggedly yours,

Akash

1. (i know i know dog-signal was right there but one must be careful of overdoing it on the puns)

2. ah sweet summer child

3. we’re closer to Hosur than Cubbon during peak traffic though on those beautific sun evens Kormangala is a 30min breeze