Akash draws his commitment to improving healthcare back to his grandfather Yallapa Kulgod, who started one of the first hospitals in the Taluka of Ramdurg in Belagavi District, North Karnataka. Growing up in a family of doctors in the 99th most populous city in India, Akash saw first-hand how impactful the practice of medicine can be, after all, what is more radical than the transformation of sickness to health? Yet, he saw how doctors were inherently constrained by the technology they had access to, and the limited time in a day, no matter how hard his grandfather, parents, uncles and aunts worked, 24 hours was not sufficient to attend to the immense sickness in a country of 1.4B people. Thus began his search for deep leverage points - places in a complex system where interventions can be difficult but have great potential to bring about transformative change.

Itamar saw up-front how dogs are capable of stupendous feats of cognition that cannot be replicated or matched by humans, even with the best technology of the 21st century. During his time as a soldier and commander of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) Special Ops K9 Unit - the legendary Oketz - Itamar worked alongside some of the most elite dogs on the planet, performing explosive detection and other complex special operations that involved extraordinary challenges with life-and-death stakes. While he held immense gratitude for the opportunity to work with dogs at the highest level, Itamar did not expect to continue to work with dogs after the completion of his service, harbouring an impulse towards doing something that held greater potential for scalable impact. Yet as fate would have it, he ended up finding a path that remained entwined with canines.