In “What does a dog’s nose know? A.I. may soon tell us”, Fortune spotlights Canaery (IndieBio SF11), a startup replicating the olfactory abilities of dogs with neurotechnology. In a seed funding round led by Breakout Ventures, Canaery recently raised $4M, according to Fortune. Dolby Family Ventures, KdT Ventures, and SOSV participated in the round. 

Canaery is developing a small electrode array to be placed on a dog’s olfactory bulb, picking up signals when neurons in the bulb fire and sending that data wirelessly to a computer attached to the dog’s collar. Fortune reports that Canaery is also training AI software to associate scents with particular firing patterns. The company, which will launch field trials of its technology using rats by the end of 2022, foresees its end product revolutionizing applications from border security to medical diagnosis. 

Canaery’s founder and CEO Gabriel Lavella told Fortune, “This does for scent what machine vision did for sight.”