If you missed yesterday’s BeTCA Belagavi Tech Meet, you also missed the opportunity to meet Akash Kulgod, a 25-year-old researcher and entrepreneur whose journey has taken him from the classrooms of St. Paul’s School to the corridors of UC Berkeley, and now into the laboratories and hospitals of India. He was a panellist at yesterday’s Tech Meet and also a revelation. His company Dognosis is a breath of fresh air in the Health Tech sector, working with dogs for cancer detection.
A Family Steeped in Medicine
Akash was born into a family where conversations around health, treatment and patient care were everyday affairs. His father, Dr. Shashikant Kulgod of Lakeview Hospital, is one of Belagavi’s most respected doctors, and across the extended family there are 11 doctors serving in different specialties. Yet, while medicine was in his DNA, Akash’s natural inclination was towards asking questions that didn’t always have straightforward answers.
The Early Spark
His foundational years at St. Paul’s School, Belagavi, gave him discipline and rigor, but it was at Sarla Birla Academy in Bengaluru, where he pursued the last 4 years of school that shaped his curiosity. The International Baccalaureate (IB) curriculum for 11th and 12th std, was where his restless mind found room to expand. The IB program, with its emphasis on independent research and interdisciplinary thinking, exposed him to neuroscience, psychology, and technology all at once.
That training opened the gates to UC Berkeley, where he enrolled in 2018. There, Akash majored in Cognitive Science, a degree that allowed him to take 25 courses from nearly 15 different departments. “Berkeley gave me the freedom to connect data science and neuroscience with computer science. It taught me that some of the most exciting discoveries happen at the intersection of disciplines,” he says.
The Pandemic Pivot
The turning point came during the COVID-19 pandemic. Already over 2.5 years at UC Berkley, Akash returned home to Belagavi. His father was deeply involved in managing COVID care at his hospital. One day, Akash stumbled on a research article about dogs being able to detect Covid by smell. On a random jog at Belagavi’s Hanuman Nagar double road, something clicked. He explains. “If dogs can detect Covid, what exactly are they doing? Can we decode it? Can technology replicate it for other diseases like cancer?”
This intersection — between canine olfaction, neuroscience, and machine learning — became the seed of his startup idea – Dognosis
Building “Dognosis”
Armed with this curiosity, Akash returned to Berkley and devoted to studying canine olfaction. After graduating, he applied for and received a grant from Emergent Ventures (George Mason University, US) under their India Specific Program headed by Shruti Rajagopalan. The grant allowed him to travel to cutting-edge labs in Israel, Budapest, and the UK, where research on disease detection and olfaction was already underway.
In Israel, he met Itamar Bitan, a young innovator equally obsessed with the idea of harnessing canine olfactory intelligence for human healthcare. Together, they co-founded Dognosis, a venture focused on developing a breath-based, non-invasive cancer detection system.
By 2023, Akash had moved back to India, this time to Bengaluru, to set up Dognosis’s operations. Unlike many peers who preferred to continue in Silicon Valley, Akash was convinced that India offered the best environment for scaling such a solution.
“India has the patients, the data, talent and the urgency,” he insists. “If we want to build a screening tool that can save lives at scale, this is the place.”
How It Works
Canine Detection: Trained dogs (including Beagles and Indie-Lab mix adopted from a Bangalore shelter, chosen based on their distinct personality and ability to think beyond human instructions using their own intelligence) are exposed to breath samples collected from patients. With their extraordinary olfactory sensitivity, they are able to distinguish between healthy and diseased samples. Their patented DogSense brain-computer interface is a real-time translator of the canine perception of smell to a digital data signature. This signature is analysed and interpreted by their DogOS suite of ML models to predict the scent of disease.
The approach has already attracted attention because the startup conducted the world’s largest clinical study of its kind, with 6,000 samples across hospitals in Hubballi, Bengaluru, and Mysuru. The results are promising: cancers that typically go undetected until late stages can potentially be screened at an early stage through a simple breath test.
“Breath is like a snapshot of the body’s biochemistry,” Akash explains. “If we can learn to read it accurately, we can make screening accessible, affordable, and non-invasive.”
The Larger Vision
For Akash, Dognosis is more than just a startup; it’s a proof of concept for how deep science ventures can emerge from India. The team currently comprises of 30 full time members including a clinical team and a tech team. He often draws inspiration from Bell Labs, the American R&D powerhouse that produced ground-breaking innovations in the 20th century.
“I dream of creating Bell Labs-like ecosystems in India — spaces where scientists, engineers, and thinkers can work together without the pressure of immediate returns, but with a long-term vision,” he says.
Even as he has traveled to over 20 countries and worked with global researchers, Akash believes that India has the right ingredients: a huge medical infrastructure, rich biodiversity, and a young, ambitious talent pool. What’s missing, he points out, is patient capital and a stronger culture of research. Currently, the Govt. is the only large scale healthcare provider for tier 2 cities and rural areas for cancer screening. Each state spends anywhere between Rs. 200 to 300 Crores every year on screening using traditional methods (that’s around Rs. 5000 crores across the nation per year). With Dognosis coming in the picture, it could revolutionise cancer screening and save lives.
Rooted in Belagavi
Despite his global exposure, Akash remains closely tied to his roots. He’s back home every couple of months. Belagavi, with its unique mix of educational institutions and medical facilities, he believes, can become a hub for such innovations. “Small towns like Belagavi shouldn’t just be consumers of technology, but creators too,” he adds. Just what BeTCA envisions and helps for.
(You can know more about Dognosis from https://www.dognosis.tech/
For more information about BeTCA and how it can help you connect with Belagavi Tech Companies or find Tech resources, visit www.betca.org )