Dognosis

Co-founder, with Itamar Bitan. Bengaluru, since 2021. dognosis.tech

Dogs can smell cancer. For decades that has been a party trick of medicine: remarkable in a paper, impossible to scale. Dognosis exists to make it ordinary. A person breathes into a mask; the mask travels to our lab; trained dogs sniff it while sensors and models read the dogs themselves (their movement, breathing, brain activity and body language) and turn a dog’s recognition into a number a doctor can use.

It started in June 2021, with the death of our family dog Lily, and a question I couldn’t put down: if dogs were already sniffing out COVID in sixty countries, why wasn’t medicine listening? The long version is in dognosis is 5 years old.

BreathEasy

BreathEasy is the screening product: a breath test for many cancers at once, costing under a dollar in consumables, meant to sit in front of expensive imaging and blood tests so they reach the people who need them.

Milestones

2026. A phase II study in the Journal of Clinical Oncology: 3,275 participants; on a held-out test cohort of 1,502, dogs plus a Bayesian model detected seven major cancer groups with 91.5% sensitivity and 90.8% specificity.
2026. Interim results from six hospitals, published in Cancer Research.
2026. Selected for the inaugural Accel Atoms X cohort, backed by Accel India and Prosus.
2025. The first 1,000 breath samples, presented at ASCO.
2024. Funded by Boost VC and 1517 Fund. The House Fund, which backs Berkeley founders, came in too.

The research behind it, from canine EEG to brain–computer interfaces for dogs, is listed on the building page and on Google Scholar.

In the press

Tigerfeathers: Dognosis: Unleashing Canine Superpowers, by Rahul Sanghi (2026)
Bloomberg: Indian startup leans on cancer-sniffing dogs and AI for early detection (2026)
TechCrunch: Accel, Prosus pick six “off-the-map” startups for inaugural India cohort (2026)
Business Standard: Can dogs help detect cancer? (2026)
BBC Hindi
Open: Can dogs smell cancer?
KTVU FOX 2: UC Berkeley grad behind a multi-cancer screening tool harnessing a dog’s sense of smell

Writing about it

dogs as deep(est) tech, Canine Medical Intuitives, dognosis is the hardest, easiest, and best company to build, and Notes on raising a deeptech seed in 2026.