Every dog deserves an identity.

Muzzl started with a simple, uncomfortable question: if the dog on your street disappeared tomorrow, would anyone be able to prove it existed?

India is home to roughly 35 million stray dogs. Most are fed by someone. Many are named by someone. Almost none of them have a record anywhere — no chip, no tag, no file. When a sterilised dog gets recaptured by an ABC team, nobody can tell it’s already been done. When a vaccinated dog bites someone, nobody can pull its history. When a lost pet turns up three streets over, nobody can prove whose home it belongs in.

We built Muzzl to close that gap with something every dog already has and nobody can take away: its nose print.

A dog’s nose print is as unique as a human fingerprint, and it doesn’t change across the dog’s lifetime — research in multiple countries has confirmed this since the 1930s. Muzzl reads it from a 10-second smartphone video, no scanner or hardware required, and turns it into a permanent, searchable identity record. It works offline in a shelter with no signal, and syncs the moment there’s a connection again.

We’re starting with the people who already know these dogs best — community feeders who track 8 to 20 dogs on a daily route, the shelters and NGOs who take them in, and the vet clinics who treat them. Every one of them registers dogs. The database grows. It gets more useful with each entry. Eventually it becomes something municipal corporations can build the ABC programme on top of — real traceability, for the first time.

Muzzl launches its first pilot in Pune in Q3 2026, with Bengaluru and Mumbai to follow.

We’re not a pet-tech company chasing a trend. We’re trying to solve a specific, unglamorous, important problem: dogs in India — stray or owned — deserve to be more than a description. “Brown, medium-sized, friendly” isn’t an identity. A nose print is.

See how it works