Canaery, the neurotech startup digitizing the sense of smell to enhance the way we perceive and monitor the world around us, announced today it has closed more than $4 million in seed funding to accelerate the development of its scent-sensing platform.
The round was led by Breakout Ventures and included participation from major investors Dolby Family Ventures, KdT Ventures and SOSV. Canaery previously was part of the IndieBio class of 2021.
“Canaery is the first company to successfully harness the miracle of nature’s olfactory system instead of trying to reinvent millions of years of evolution,” said Gabriel Lavella, CEO and founder of Canaery. “I’m grateful for the support and faith shown by our investors, and for the hard work and dedication of everyone on team Canaery. This capital will help us recruit additional top tier engineering talent and further invest in R&D as we move toward full commercialization.”
Throughout history people have trained animals to identify and respond to useful scents that would otherwise be untraceable by humans. Rats have been trained to detect landmines, pigs taught to root out truffles, and dogs used for everything from game hunting to drug interdiction.
With its proprietary neural interface based on nearly a decade of primary research, Canaery can detect every scent that enters the natural olfactory system of a working animal and wirelessly transmit the chemical signatures to the cloud for processing. All of this happens in seconds, even if the animal cannot consciously identify the scent. There is no special training required and no chance of accidental handler misdirection. Canaery can even identify scents that the animal may never have encountered before.
The resulting continuous analysis can be used for early diagnosis of diseases, preventing the spread of invasive species, or identifying other scent-based signatures such as environmental hazards and explosives.
“For years we have looked at approaches to digitize scent and have never found a solution as elegant and scalable as Canaery’s technology,” said Lindy Fishburne, Breakout Ventures managing partner and Canaery board member.
