Pet project emerges from Seattle startup studio: a new app that connects dogs and their parents

Amish Patel knows his neighbors by their dogs’ names before he knows their own. It’s a pattern he noticed in his Seattle neighborhood — and one he’s now built an app around.

Patel’s newest pet project — born out of his Conduit Venture Labs startup studio, is Sniff, an iOS app that turns the everyday moment two dogs greet each other on a walk into a lasting connection between their humans.

The idea traces back to Patel’s own block in Seattle’s Madrona neighborhood, where he moved with his standard poodle, Chewie, right before the pandemic. With no kids and limited ways to meet people, the neighborhood park became the default hangout — and a group text thread became, in Patel’s words, a real sense of community. The catch: most of those contacts were saved under names like “Glory’s mom” or “Louie’s dad.”

“The five people in Madrona that I hang out with, more often I met through him,” Patel said of Chewie.

Beyond widening Patel’s own social circle, Sniff has a greater societal objective — taking on loneliness and isolation, an epidemic cited in the U.S. Surgeon General’s 2023 advisory on social connection.

“Younger people are having kids less, getting more isolated … we’re sitting on our phones, even though we’re all next to each other,” Patel said. “One out of four people don’t know their neighbors or talk to their neighbors.”

Dogs — and Sniff — could be an answer.

Sniff verifies that users are real people who actually live in the neighborhood they claim, using address and location data, and the app is geofenced so members can only discover dogs nearby. Inside the app, users see only dog profiles and photos — no human names or personal details — until a connection is made. Patel said artificial intelligence plays a role only on the trust-and-safety side — confirming identity and location — rather than in matching people up.

Once connected, neighbors can message through the app, arrange meetups, and lean on each other for help — dog walking, sitting, or just a hand when something comes up. Patel said the trust that builds from already knowing someone’s dog often translates directly into people who are willing to help.

The pilot is open in Madrona, Leschi, Madison Park, the Central District and Capitol Hill, but pet parents anywhere in Seattle can sign up today. Each neighborhood stays geofenced until it reaches enough engaged sign-ups, at which point Sniff opens it up — Madrona, the first to launch, already has about 100 people on the platform.

To help build momentum in each neighborhood, Sniff is partnering with the Seattle Chamber of Connection — where Patel sits on the board — to recruit “Pack Leaders”: local dog owners who help organize meetups and informal introductions as their neighborhood’s user base grows.

Patel is a Microsoft vet who spent eight years on projects including Xbox Kinect and Microsoft Band, before moving into the startup world with stints at fitness wearable maker Katalyst and football helmet manufacturer Vicis. He landed an entrepreneur-in-residence role at Seattle startup studio Pioneer Square Labs in 2020, and two years later co-founded Conduit Venture Labs with Susan Paley, the former first CEO of Beats by Dre.

Conduit focuses on “hard-tech” ventures that blend hardware and software. Sniff is Conduit’s fourth in-house startup, following Fluffy — a computer vision platform for doggy daycares — and an audiobook AI venture in the loneliness space that Patel said is preparing for a public seed round this fall. A fourth project, in health tech, remains under wraps for now.

The Sniff app itself was built lean: a couple of developers, a product lead, and Patel splitting his time across the studio’s other projects. Patel said the team has since shifted to AI-assisted development to move faster, and is now searching for a CEO to take the project in-house full time as it raises capital and pursues some hardware-related features.

For all the talk of trust layers, geofencing and future hardware, Sniff’s entire premise still comes down to a dog doing what dogs do. The humans get the friendships, the favors, the group texts. The dogs, Patel said, get something simpler.

“They just get to be more social,” he said, “because we don’t keep them in our house with us while we’re doom scrolling through everything.”