Riaan Mody, student entrepreneur from the Fall 2025 Cohort, has had an immense love for animals since childhood and is passionate about the protection of stray animals in his home city of Ahmedabad, India.

His venture Care4Dogs is an animal welfare education and placement platform that professionalizes volunteer work for stray dog care in India. The company offers a specialized training curriculum that certifies volunteers in essential rescue and care skills, then utilizes a matching platform to connect these certified individuals with NGOs that require their specific skill sets.

The Problem: Animal Welfare NGOs Do Not Receive Adequate Support

The animal rescue sector in India faces a dual challenge:

• Volunteer Inefficiency: Many high-intent volunteers lack basic training in dog behavior, safety, or first aid, meaning NGOs must spend significant time and resources training them from scratch.

• Skill Mismatch: NGOs often struggle to find volunteers who possess specific technical skills—such as medical assistance or documentation—leading to operational bottlenecks.

• High Turnover: Without a structured path or recognition (like certification), volunteer engagement often drops off quickly.

  
  

The Solution: Care4Dogs streamlines the volunteer lifecycle through a "Train-to-Match" model

• Standardized Training: An expert-led curriculum covering safety, first aid, vaccination assistance, and community dog management.

• Official Certification: Volunteers earn official Care4Dogs certificates upon completion, validating their competency to prospective NGOs.

• The Matching Portal: A specialized platform where NGOs can list specific needs and be matched with volunteers whose certified skills directly meet those requirements.

  
  

The Care4Dogs MVP successfully launched with an initial suite of three core training modules focused on safety and medical basics.

Riaan has already initiated partnerships with local Mumbai-based NGOs to test the placement portal, resulting in the successful matching of the first batch of certified student volunteers. Feedback from these organizations has highlighted that Care4Dogs volunteers are able to "hit the ground running," significantly reducing the supervision required by full-time staff. The platform now includes a dashboard for volunteers to track their certification progress and a recruitment portal for partner NGOs to view certified candidate profiles.

Riaan’s long-term vision is to establish Care4Dogs as the national standard for animal welfare certifications in India. He aims to expand the curriculum to include advanced rescue techniques and animal law, creating a pipeline of professionalized volunteers that can support municipal animal control and large-scale sterilization programs. By bridging the gap between raw enthusiasm and professional skill, Care4Dogs intends to scale the capacity of the entire NGO sector, ensuring that every stray dog in India has access to a network of competent, trained, and certified caregivers.