During the summer, I travelled to North Tallinn to meet one man and his dog in the sunshine. Well, the Tallinn sunshine. Almog Koren remarks to me, “This is not summer," as we are outside a cafe with his dog Echo.
Koren is the founder and CEO of Dogbase, a training and operations platform for dogs. The American-Israeli has been in Estonia for over a year and seems to be settling in quite well.
“He likes it a lot here; he likes the forest”, he tells me when I ask how Echo is adapting to life in Estonia. “The winter was really amazing. It was my first kind of 'winter, winter,' and Echo loved it. He loved the snow.”
His startup was already established before he came to Estonia; he built it remotely, and he tells me that at the moment it’s “doing well.”
Curious to know more about how he came to build Dogbase we delved a little into his background. “If you asked me a few years ago, would I do a startup with dogs? I'd be like, why?”
If you were at Latitude59 this year, you may have seen Echo on stage. After the conclusion of the pitch competition, a syndicated investment by angel investors from EstBAN, LatBAN, and FiBAN chose Dogbase to receive up to €100,000.
Finding Echo
Koren grew up in the U.S. but has also travelled the globe, living in places like Australia, Israel and Spain. He’s a software engineer by trade and is a bit of a serial entrepreneur. His first startup was in gaming, capitalising on the rise of mobile; the company developed APIs for game developers, which he tells me “did pretty well but didn’t succeed in the end.” Calling it a "successful failure”.
His second startup was an ERP for banana farming in the Dominican Republic. He sold his shares and got out of that company “Worked in corporate for a bit, running a development team, and then after that, Dogbase got started.”
Koren’s kidneys were failing. It came as a complete surprise as he went from being an active, fit man who enjoyed surfing and was part of a lifeguarding team to someone hooked up to dialysis. That's when Echo, as a puppy, entered his life.
“I ended up getting Echo as my service dog… and then after I got a transplant, six months to a year later, Echo was kind of bored. He's a Belgian Malinois,” he says.
Such an active dog needed something to do to keep his mind occupied, so Koren decided to train him as a search and rescue dog, and that’s where the idea for Dogbase came in.
Building Dogbase
The trainer he went to was very disorganised, never remembering what training Echo had done, so Koren used his skills to design an app to track Echo’s training.
“I posted a bunch of screenshots of my app that I was developing, in different Facebook groups that I was part of - to learn about dog training because it wasn't a world that I was from,” he said.
Having served in both the US and Israeli military, he was aware of service dogs and had been on missions with them but had no training or handler experience.
“I started getting emails and Facebook messages. Can we use this? And I [thought] okay, well maybe there's something here. And then I just started developing it as a product. I didn't really care about the market size or investors. It was more about, ‘hey, I have a passion for this, and I really want to see what I can do with it’, and then it grew from there into being a product,” he explains.
He goes on to tell me that one of his first pilots was with a UK military unit, but Dogbase didn’t deliver on their promise; however, that didn’t deter him.
“We got into TechStars Australia in 2023, and then we launched the product, the first version, kind of a prototype or MVP, in TechStars,” he says.
Built for purpose
“I didn't want to go and build a bunch of features that no one would use. I wanted to listen to people and how they would use it. So we spent a good six months to a year just listening to people, getting the customers, getting users, getting feedback, and developing what they wanted. So 90% of the product is what users actually want, and that took us about a year to actually go from a MVP to a full product - where we are now, which is completely different from where we started,” he says.
The plan for now is continued growth. During the summer, Dogbase onboarded Texas Search and Rescue and had one of its best months of sales.
Having seen him pitch before during a defence tech meet up I asked if thats a sector he’s keen to tackle.
“It's just a more complicated sales cycle, and as you can imagine, defence has its own requirements,” he says. But it sounds like he doesn’t need to define a sector right now. “The market size for service dogs, therapy dogs, and dog sports is very huge.”
At the time of writing, the investment by the BANs promised during Latitude59 had not come to fruition.
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