Interesting Journeys Into Petpreneurship: Almog Koren

Welcome to Part Ten of our series on Interesting Journeys Into Petpreneurship! In this episode, Roch CEO Guise Bule talks to Almog Koren, co-founder/CEO of DogBase, to discuss his unique path from military service and software development to revolutionizing dog training with AI-driven technology.

Recognizing the lack of digital tools for tracking canine training progress, Koren leveraged his personal and professional experiences to create a mobile app that quickly gained traction among search and rescue teams, military units, competitive dog sports, and more.

Ready, set, go!

Bule: So let's maybe talk about what you did before you were a petpreneur and how that led you to start a pet business. That's a good place to start. What did that look like?

Koren: I mean, so I was in the military for a little bit. And then after the military, I got into software development. And I have been doing software for 18 years now. In that period of software development, I worked at big companies, big startups, well...not really startups. I've been in private equity. My first job was at this company called Waves Audio in Tel Aviv. And they're like private equity to founders from the Israeli military intelligence. And it was a cool startup. It was basically – like Waves does the audio plug-ins. So every song that you hear, every concert, every album has their technology behind it.

And everyone that worked there – I remember the first day I got there – everyone that worked there was musicians, artists. They ran music. They loved and lived music. And I was like, no, I'm not a music person. They looked at me like, what do you do?

But that was the beginning. And then from there, I did advertising agencies and studios. And then I went independent.

Bule: And did you have a dog throughout that part of your life? A dog within your life?

Koren: So I had a dog when I was in middle school. A family dog. My mom was pissed. We had a move, got rid of him, probably, I don't even know what happened. But I loved that dog. He ate all the furniture. My mom didn't like it. But it was cool. It was like a Champagne showdog. So it had the gray skin, the blue eyes. Very very family-friendly dog.

And then in the military, that was my experience until the Belgian Malinois. So we did missions with them. Most of the guys were scared of dogs. But I was like, oh, cool! I would play with them and they would get mad because we're supposed to play with them before mission or before training.

Bule: How did that lead into the business you're doing now, the business you founded?

Koren: So I mean, fast forward as a software engineer for a long time, I did about two or three startups and different programs.

Bule: Were you a back-end guy, front-end guy?

Koren: I did pretty much everything. I grew into different positions over time. I think most developers will have to transition and learn new technologies. But I ended up going from being a software engineer to actually being an entrepreneur. I had a startup in a gym... had a startup working in farming. But after that, I was like, I'm never doing a startup again. Go give me the high-end corporate job. I moved to Australia at the time. Corporate jobs are nice. The salary, the benefits...It was 9 to 5. I did not work after 5. I ran a development team, high salary. It was really, really great. Pretty happy. Let me just– with a nice 401k, do some investment, I'll be happy. And things are kind of good in that sense.

Bule: Nice life!

Koren: Yeah, things are going pretty good at that end. But, yeah, long story short, my kidneys shut down and I was on dialysis in the hospital.

Bule: Oh no!

Koren: You see all these doctors, and they redo all the workouts because they don't trust the doctors over there in a different system. And so the psychiatrist was like, well, you're in a really bad place. Physically and mentally, I was like, no shit! I know I'm in a bad place.

He suggested a bunch of medication. I have no problem with medication but I don't want to see some medications that he suggested I take at the time. And I was like, this is great, but it's not really for me right now. I'm kind of already messed up as it is. I don't want to be stuck on these medications for a long time. But we have to do something. And I was like, you know what? I've got plenty of time. I'm not working because of going to the hospital three days a week. I'll get a service dog! Everything will be fine.

And he just looked at me... his head didn't know how to calculate what I was telling him. And it's not a medical solution. That's not a medical solution. But at the same time, he was like, well, I can't really argue with that because there are statistics around it. There is proof around that. And you can't force me to take medication. We're in a free country, right? So he was like, all right, well, good luck, and let me know if there are any problems. And then that's how I got my dog, Echo. It's a Belgian Malinois off of a working dog line.

Bule: I see.

Koren: So they're designed to do the fast protection, military, whatever. Very, very high drive. Really easy to train as a service dog for what I needed. It was more of a therapy-sized service dog, maybe some protection. I did have a catheter, which I needed to be careful. So I didn't want people getting close to me because I'm an infection or getting pulled out.

I think a couple of months later, I got my transplant. So I got a transplant, and I was healthy and everything. And then I hooked up with such a rescue unit, and I was like, hey, that's a really good dog. I'm ex-military. I have certain backgrounds that might be helpful, which you guys are interested in for getting more handlers. So they did an interview for me first. They interviewed me, and then they did a test on my dog.

Bule: So you're interviewing for –what organization was this?

Koren: It's called the Israel Dog Unit. It's a volunteer rescue unit for missing persons.

He was still a puppy then. You train him for about a year, a year and a half until he gets ready, and then he can do deployments. And training was going really good, but we were trained like twice a week, maybe sometimes three times a week, or once a week, depending on schedules and holidays. And then, so they had this Google Form, which was pretty shit. I didn't know how many hours I'm actually training a month. What's going on? I did six and a half days. Did I train last week? Yes. And how long did we train?

I was like, well, I'm a developer...Let me just write some code. I did a mobile app, a simple app, nothing too crazy. And then I just posted it. At the time, I was a part of a bunch of Facebook groups...I was just learning.

Bule: Let's just drill down into what you just said there a little bit. So you identified a problem. Especially people with dogs like Malinois. They were lacking resources on how to properly train these dogs, how to properly enrich their lives and care for them, right?

Koren: So I think for me, it's a very interesting story because, at the time, it wasn't like, oh, there's a problem; I'm going to fix it. Well, that's what I'm doing now. But in the beginning, it was more like, OK, I– we were training the dog. And it wasn't clear what was going on. We tried a Google form. That didn't work too well. I was like, I'll just write a little application for myself. So it was a pain that I was experiencing specifically training my dog Echo for Search and Rescue.

So I did a little app. I posted it in a Facebook group for Search and Rescue in Belgium, all those two or three groups. I had about, I think, 100 messages in 24 hours. I kept getting messages. And then I was like, well, there seems to be something here. Other people from Search and Rescue, including a unit from the UK military, reached out to me, very spontaneously through Facebook Messenger.

And they're like, we like what we saw. Can we use it? And I was like, well, what do you mean? You have nothing right now? And then, so I basically said, OK, well, give me a couple of days. Let me get back to you. I didn't understand what's going on here. And then I went to my co-founder. He was like, well, there's some reason to see what's in the market. And there really wasn't anything in the market. And you realize that most people are using pen and paper, at best Excel, and maybe some old-school enterprise that was built like 20 years ago.

So it was my experiences and my pain of working and training my dog for such a rescue and realizing that this is not – I want to track what's going on. I want to track what my dog is doing. I want to have some data, some insights around that. And then maybe in the future, we'll be able to do all kinds of cool things. And then really quickly understood that there's a market for it, a huge market, a huge need for it.

Bule:  So when did this all begin? What year was that?

Koren: It was probably almost a couple months before end of 2022.

Bule: Now, along that journey, where are you now in terms of users...

Koren: Well, we have a product. Not all the features are done, of course. But we have some big customers using our app every day. We have engagement. We're building out– we released the AI stuff a couple of days ago. The first part of our AI feature set, which was two years ago, was more of an idea. What are we going to do in AI? Now, we actually know what we're going to be doing in AI. We actually have a plan. And we're starting to release part of that plan, which is really exciting.

Bule: What does that look like from a user perspective?

Koren: So one of the things we have is we call it the dog-based AI recap. So you basically click a button in our platform. You select the dog. So you select– let's say it's like Echo my dog. And then I select what training. So we have different training options. We have 'fitness' and 'search and rescue.' We have a 'service dog and protection'.

So I click on search and rescue. We basically do– we go back to your five recent trainings. And we do a generative AI summarization with progressive and segment analysis. Tells you where you're at in training. Progressive segment analysis.

We give you a recommendation saying, based on these – and based on what you wrote, how your trainings went, what you should do next. And then we give you a segment analysis on the dog and you as a trainer based on how you're writing things down. You can read that in like two minutes in the field on the go and start your training session. So you know exactly what you did last time and where you were at. The idea is to progress further into that and provide you with more recommendations and save time and money.

Bule: Really interesting!

Koren: And I'll give you an example. A month ago, I had someone sign up using our platform. I think they even just paid by themselves. They had one or two dogs. And they were doing– what they were using– was HRD (Human Remains Detection) Search and Rescue, so cadaver dogs.

They sent me an email saying, Hey, this is really great. We like this. But I'm doing archaeology HRD. And I was like, what is archaeology HRD? And basically, they're using dogs to find cold case bones, but also burial sites.

Bule: Is that a training track within your application?

Koren: Yeah. So in our application, we have what we call different training types, right? So if you're doing protection training or fitness training or explosives training, and then based on those categories, you log that information. That is very important for the data input.

And then a couple of days ago, I had a call with another company that does the same thing, but on a massive scale. And they get contracts from the National Parks and Service, the Wildlife Service of the US, and the Army Corps of Engineers.

To me, that's like, oh my god, there's like a whole other industry that's growing and being more popular. And then I had the same experience with pipeline detection. They're using dogs now for pipeline detection on gas and on big pipelines for oil and gas to find the leaks. So it's like– so the security in the military, that's always going to be there. And now we're talking about service dogs and therapy dogs now, which is standardized. And now, I think I saw on the website there are hotels that now accept service dogs and therapy dogs. So I think, to me, I'm just excited to be working within an interesting space.

Everywhere you look at it, the demand for those kinds of dogs – service animals, work dogs – is going to increase, right? Whichever way you look at the kind of world around us, you can see the demand increasing. And I think that is a reasonable long-term view to take.

Bule: Speaking of the long-term, what does it take to be a successful petpreneur in your view? What core characteristics?

Koren: So you have to be resilient. And I'd say resilience is basically like, you might get 10 No's in the same day or a week. And you still need to be able to go okay, cool, I respect that decision and not get mad and be respectful to the person that said "No," rather than get defensive or get aggressive in the email reply. Just like, let it go and then move on and still believe in your vision.

Bule: Last question, and this is the shout-out question: are there any pet startups or founders out there you wanna shout out?

Koren: I mean, there's a really cool one that I just met called SpotitEarly working on this thing around dog health. It's like DNA based for stem cell research for dogs. So by using certain stem cells, they can help the dogs with their hips and stuff. They are really on the cutting edge.

Bule: Amazing! Thanks so much for your time and for sharing your journey.

Koren: Thank you for having me on; it was a pleasure speaking with you.

This concludes our interview. Please give Almog Koren and DogBase a follow on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram (@mydogbase).

If you would like to talk to us about your interesting journey, please get in touch!