Dognosis Pupdate: September and October 2026
These two months took our story further around the world than ever before, and brought our commercial launch into view.
A big woof from your favourite interspecies team!
Dognosis in the News
Akash studied cognitive science at UC Berkeley, so it felt fitting that September began with a nod from his alma mater. On 4 September, UC Berkeley shared a KTVU FOX 2 story about how a Berkeley graduate came to build a cancer test around dogs, featuring Chloe and Jessie, our true heroes.
A few days later, things really took off. On 7 September, the global news agency AFP (Agence France-Presse) released its story, which was picked up by papers in Pakistan, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Malaysia and Kuwait. Outlets in Nigeria, Kazakhstan, the US and Portugal also covered the work in their own words. The Chosun Ilbo, one of South Korea's largest newspapers, ran a feature of its own.
Closer to home, NDTV spent a day at our lab filming a TV feature with our team. Tanmay Hardikar of The Ken wrote a long read on dogs and early cancer detection in India, and in October The Ken turned the story into an episode of its Daybreak podcast. Tanvi Raut Dessai from Filter Coffee did a lovely video feature with both Itamar and Akash on our story. Meanwhile, Akash joined Michal on the Accelerate Bio podcast to discuss our Phase II results, dog-tech, and the vision of Dognosis.
In October we were also selected as one of the 30 early-stage startups in YourStory's Tech30 2026, its yearly selection of the companies building India's next generation of technology.
Away from the headlines, we've started to see other researchers cite our study in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. If you're curious about the science behind the coverage, our blog post Every Disease Has a Scent is a good place to start, and our new Meet series introduces the three pieces of technology that sit around the dogs: SniffSpace, DogSense and DogOS.
We also crossed 5,000 followers on Instagram, 6,000 on LinkedIn and 1,000 on X. Thank you to everyone following us and being a part of our journey. We are just getting started!
Out in the Community
We spent the evening of 2 September at Kadhaigal Books for their Curious Wednesdays science series, where Manal shared the Dognosis story, Mohith and Abhijit took the science questions and Jessie, as everyone predicted, stole the show. Ten days later, Akash and Aswin joined the Multispecies Hackathon run by the Samagata Foundation and Socratus, where they talked about what we're building and gave an early look at Namma Indies, a new open-source project we'll share more about soon.
From 13 to 15 October, Itamar was in Delhi for the Bloomberg New Economy Forum, thanks to an invite from Aaryaman at Tigerfeathers. He was a featured speaker on one of the forum's liveliest panels, alongside researchers, investors and government officials. He also spent much of the forum in closed-door roundtables with the cancer coalition Bloomberg brought together, which included leaders from Memorial Sloan Kettering, the US National Cancer Institute, ASCO, AstraZeneca and Harvard. Itamar shared more on LinkedIn.
Over in Goa, Itamar, Jessie, Abhijit, Aswin and Goutham spent about a week at Edge City India, where Jessie discovered she is a beach girl. Two more events kept us busy in the last week of October: Divith and Madhumita led our kiosk at the AI Conclave at IISc's Centre for Brain Research, and Sagar and Viraj spent two days at FICCI HEAL in Delhi.
Inside Dognosis
Our engineering team spent much of September improving SniffSpace V2, the platform where our dogs sniff samples. In October, the 3D-printed parts in SniffSpace's ports were replaced with metal ones that have run through hundreds of continuous cycles. DogSense, the brain-computer interface headset that records a dog's brain response to a sample, got a better fit too: we tested new padding over several days and are still refining the fit dog by dog. Our R&D team has also designed a study of how much one person's breath varies from day to day, which will shape how we collect samples, and the first pilot sessions began in October.
Behind the scenes, Tail, our homegrown tool for running Dognosis day to day, got a major upgrade. It now turns meeting notes into suggested tasks, tracks each team's progress on shared boards and writes a weekly digest of what each pack member accomplished, so nothing gets buried in a slack message or a meeting note. With more people joining over the next few months, that's what will keep us moving in step.
Six people joined us over these two months: Lokesh Poovaragan (computer vision and machine learning), Drishti Bhagchandani (research), Bheemaraja B (finance and accounts), Prajwal Jadhav (hardware), Asha Das (design) and Ami Palan, who leads our brand.
Getting Ready to Launch
We're getting ready for our commercial launch. In January we'll open a small friends-and-family beta for 100 people, and in March 2027 we open to our waitlist in Bengaluru. We plan to expand to more cities later in the year. If you'd like to be among the first to take our breath test, join the waitlist and we'll reach out the moment we come to your city.
With all of this landing in 2027, it's shaping up to be our biggest year yet, and we're only just warming up our paws.
Dogspeed,
The Dognosis Pack
