Cat Person or Dog Person? Dania Alnahdi Embraces Another Category: Pet Health Advocate

Moonie had always been a playful kitten. She was the first Alnahdi family pet, and proved for eldest sister Dania that love at first sight was possible and palpable. Before long, says Alnahdi, she’d morphed into an “anxious pet parent” with her eye and mind on all things Moonie. So, when the feline—already a picky eater—became lethargic, Alnahdi’s caretaking senses heightened.

Then came the “big surprise,” she says. There was blood in Moonie’s urine.

One misdiagnosis, three months, and countless veterinary visits later, clinicians had finally pinpointed the culprit: late-stage kidney disease. By then, Moonie had lost a kidney and was prescribed medication to stabilize her symptoms.

“It was a huge shock for us to know that, this whole time, she was developing a chronic disease and was probably in pain,” says Alnahdi, a graduate of Northeastern University’s Khoury College of Computer Sciences. Though Moonie eventually healed, Alnahdi anticipates that long-term impacts from her illness could limit the cat’s life expectancy.

The outcome for Moonie may have been different—if Alnahdi and her family had had access to her biotech startup, Cora Care, back then.

The company’s at-home diagnostics tool, still in development, aims to detect early signs of disease in pets. It’s a rapid, noninvasive test that owners will administer on their own time and turf. The simple process starts with a smart strip, swabbed on a pet’s cheek to gather key biomarkers such as cortisol, glucose, and CRP (or C-reactive protein, high levels of which can indicate inflammation or infection). The strip is then inserted into an accompanying device which, within one minute, will send a health report to the pet parent’s mobile phone with a bluetooth signal.

The Cora Care system is intended to collect data about a pet over time, using machine learning and information provided by the owner (such as breed, weight, and height) to make ongoing assessments and recommendations for preventative care. It’s “technology with purpose,” says Alnahdi, whose idea to revolutionize pet care gripped Innovator Award judges this year.

The annual celebration of and forum for Northeastern founders brings together both new and experienced entrepreneurs. They pitch their concepts, hone their ideas, and join in the running for funds to take their initiatives to the next level. Alnahdi, who earned second place recognition this year, is among 69 innovators honored by Women Who Empower since the team launched the Innovator Awards in 2021. In total, recipients have taken home more than $820,000 to reinvest in their businesses.

Alnahdi, who acts as engineer and user design whiz at Cora Care, attributes her startup mindset to the agility and resourcefulness required at hackathons. The summits encourage participants to think holistically and leverage their unique technical skills as they develop products to improve or augment life as they know it. While at Hack for the People, for example, Alnahdi coded a rating system to assign sustainability scores to restaurants. All the while, she was focused on her end users; those diners would be empowered to visit eateries which fulfilled Alnahdi’s sustainability criteria.

It’s as if life itself is a sandbox for Alnahdi, who expertly measures risks, assembles teams, and transforms motivation into execution at every stage of the journey. After graduating from Northeastern in 2021, she prepared for her next opportunity to do exactly that: the Master of Science in Innovation and Management program at Tufts University’s Gordon Institute.

The program is a lot like Shark Tank, says Alnahdi’s former classmate and Cora Care co-founder Hadley Haselmann. Complete with a pitching marathon to determine viable ideas and establish startup teams, the end goal of the experience is to launch and fund student ventures. While some groups and pursuits shifted after the end of their first semester, Cora Care—both the team and the venture—endured for the full year.

“We set the tone for the work and effort we wanted to put in, and our team decided to give it our all,” says Alnahdi. She remembers balancing midterm exams with pet health expos where she networked and conducted market research with pet owners. Her schedule was also stacked with hours spent tinkering in the lab with Tufts researchers on the Cora Care prototype. The company’s namesake, dog of fellow co-founder Jaime, even snuggled up with them as they prepared for their final presentation.

An accelerated track toward launch could splinter any team. But open communication and skillful matching of team members’ different, yet complementary, abilities helped them survive the “organized chaos” that defines most startups, says Haselmann.

“[Dania] was celebrating my strengths because she knew they helped her. And I was celebrating hers because I knew I needed them.” While Alnahdi thrives with user design and organization, Haselmann embraces her role as networker and idea generator, she says.

Cora Care arrived on the heels of the COVID-19 pandemic, when at-home swabs were commonplace and pet adoptions were on the rise. One year later, the prototype is progressing through the development and market validation phases. Alnahdi considers future market testing the first of major milestones to come for her team members. Until then, they’re pursuing accelerator programs like MassChallenge, in which Cora Care was a recent finalist.

It’s an achievement that may not have seemed possible for Alnahdi while growing up in Bahrain.

“The one thing that I didn’t really experience here was computer science or technology education,” she reflects now. But she made her way, and made it her mission to help aspiring technology leaders from all backgrounds do the same.

Alnahdi earned recognition among the 2021 Huntington 100 for her founding of NU MULTI, which fosters diversity and inclusion among her Khoury College peers. She’s also encouraged her sisters, Jumana, currently a Northeastern student, and Mayar, in high school, to dabble in computer science. At her first hackathon, though, Mayar did more than dabble—she won.

It’s an “honor,” says Alnahdi, to witness not just representation but also undeniable success. “Just to see them being encouraged to explore these fields, and having the courage to do so, makes me really happy.”