DANNCE.AI Raises $2.6 Million; Launches to Provide Clinicians and Drug Developers an AI Biomarkers Platform to Characterize Drug Effects and Optimize Neurological Care
NOTE: DANNCE.ai, a start-up from the lab of Assistant Professor Timothy Dunn (BME, Pratt), is developing an automated way of tracking and quantifying movement to identify disease states and drug effects with support from the Gilhuly Accelerator Fund. The company is run by Pratt graduate Rob Baldoni (BSE’21, MEng’22) and Shereen Shermak (BSE’89) and is a Duke Capital Partners portfolio company. This press release first appeared on GlobeNewswire.
BOSTON, Nov. 21, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — DANNCE.AI raised $2.6 million in pre-seed funding led by LDV Capital, following initial investment from Glasswing Ventures, with participation from The Leo Lion Company, Duke Capital Partners, and Merck Digital Sciences Studio. DANNCE.AI is bringing to market DANNCE, a novel phenotyping platform to digitize the clinical assessments used by doctors and therapeutic developers to quantify movement. DANNCE is a new approach to the clinical exam that ingests videos of patients and automatically analyzes them for evidence of neurological disease. The platform can also evaluate the efficacy of drugs for patients with neurological disorders.
Today, clinicians have no tools to evaluate patient movement objectively. For example, when diagnosing Parkinson’s Disease, patients perform various tasks, and clinicians manually rate the severity of their impairment on a 0-4 scale. Even the most experienced clinicians can be inconsistent in the way they score patients, and scoring is variable across doctors. High variance in scoring on an insensitive rating scale leads to impaired clinical decision-making and makes it challenging for companies to determine the efficacy of new therapeutics.
DANNCE will deliver comprehensive quantifications of behavior and body mechanics, which will be feasible to implement in the clinic for the first time. DANNCE uses AI to reconstruct a patient’s movement in 3D using videos from multiple cameras and transforms the data into quantified, easy-to-interpret readouts of movement and behavior. DANNCE can be used to diagnose patients, calculate the severity of their impairments, and monitor their change over time. This represents a paradigm shift from the current standard of care, which relies on clinicians to administer and score subjective assessments. DANNCE’s behavioral quantification workflow, built on top of markerless pose tracking, recapitulates doctors’ findings and unlocks inaccessible clinical insights by analyzing gross and fine movement.
DANNCE.AI’s technology originated at Harvard University, where Dr. Tim Dunn and Dr. Jesse Marshall met as postdocs in 2016 while studying the neuronal control of movement in rats. Noticing a lack of tools to measure movement accurately, they, along with Prof. Bence Ölveczky and Diego Aldarondo, invented DANNCE to understand how drugs modulate movement circuits. Tim later became a faculty member at Duke, where he further advanced the platform and met Rob Baldoni, one of his first students, who would lead the commercialization of the technology. In August 2024, the DANNCE.AI team licensed the DANNCE platform from both universities, transitioning the technology from academic to clinical use. Dr. Tim Dunn (CSO) and Dr. Jesse Marshall (Advisor) are DANNCE.AI’s co-founders, along with Rob Baldoni (CEO), who was recently featured in the Boston Business Journal’s 2024 list of 25 Under 251.
“One in ten individuals will be diagnosed with a movement disorder during their lifetime. We are creating a world where aging adults have broad access to objective neurological screenings and new therapies for these disorders are also objectively validated,” says Rob Baldoni, CEO and co-founder of DANNCE.AI. “We have brought together a powerhouse team with Tim and Jesse, two of the world’s leading experts in behavioral quantification, Shereen Shermak, our COO, and Joe Chan, our CTO, who have an extensive track record of scaling ventures and building products. We will be the first to provide clinicians and drug developers with a solution that characterizes drug effects and optimizes neurological care.”
In a clinic equipped with DANNCE, clinicians can capture videos of patient movement as they perform routine tests. The system analyzes the video to identify patterns of movement associated with different diseases. By the end of the visit, the clinician has a readout of scores that they can use to communicate with the patients and discuss any changes in the patient’s scores since the last visit. Over multiple visits, a digital history of a patient’s movements can be tracked and analyzed more effectively than the manual analysis performed to date.
Dr. William Dauer, the inaugural Director of the Peter O’Donnell Jr. Brain Institute and a Professor of Neurology and Neuroscience at UT Southwestern Medical Center, acclaimed for his research in Parkinson’s disease, weighed in on what a future with DANNCE will look like: “I’m excited for the day when DANNCE is incorporated into clinical practice. Over more than two decades of practicing medicine, I’ve come to recognize the limitations of relying on human judgment to evaluate movement disorders. An objective, quantifiable and easy-to-use method of movement assessment would be valuable for patient care and empower future research.”
“We at LDV Capital are thrilled to partner with the brilliant deep tech team at DANNCE.AI to leverage advanced computer vision solutions to increase drug efficacy and significantly improve the lives of people with movement disorders,” says Evan Nisselson, General Partner at LDV Capital. “We thrive on investing in people building innovative solutions that enhance people’s lives and provide substantial value.”
“Glasswing Ventures invests in visionary founders who push the boundaries of possibility and disrupt their industries using frontier technology,” said James Massaquoi, Investment Associate at Glasswing Ventures. “Rob and the DANNCE.AI team are reinventing how clinicians diagnose and treat neurological diseases. They have eliminated manual, subjective clinical processes by using advanced AI-driven motion analysis to measure neurological conditions and transform drug trials and clinical decision-making.”
For media, product and partnership and all other inquiries:
Rob Baldoni, CEO & co-founder, rob@dannce.ai, 914-216-2880
About DANNCE.AI
DANNCE (3-Dimensional Aligned Neural Network for Computational Ethology) is a markerless motion capture approach that uses deep learning to quantify behavior and detect diseases. The company is co-founded by Dr. Tim Dunn (CSO), Dr. Jesse Marshall, and Robert Baldoni (CEO). This solution can serve as both a clinical trial endpoint and an automated motor exam, due to its actionable clinical insights, scientific rationale, and ease of integration with the neurological workflow. In late 2023, DANNCE.AI was accepted into Cohort 2 of Merck Digital Sciences Studio.
About LDV Capital
LDV Capital is a thesis-driven early-stage venture fund investing in people building businesses powered by visual technology that leverage computer vision, machine learning and artificial intelligence to analyze visual data. Deep knowledge of the domain, extensive expert network and unique platform initiatives have made LDV Capital a leader in the visual tech ecosystem. Led by serial entrepreneur Evan Nisselson, LDV Capital has been investing in pre-seed and seed-stage teams across North America and Europe since 2012.
About Glasswing Ventures
Glasswing Ventures is a first-capital-in venture capital firm dedicated to investing in startups applying AI and frontier technology to enterprise and cybersecurity markets. The firm was founded by visionary partners with decades of experience in these markets, a disciplined investment approach, and a strong track record of industry-leading returns. Glasswing leverages its deep domain expertise and world-leading advisory councils to invest in exceptional founders who transform markets and revolutionize industries.
About The Leo Lion Company
Founded in 2022, Leo Lion is a Venture Capital investment firm based in Hindhead, United Kingdom. The firm mission is to usher in a transformative shift in the way businesses are conceived and operated. The firm firmly believes that when values take center stage in corporate endeavors, businesses become a potent force for securing both social and economic prosperity.
About Duke Capital Partners
Duke Capital Partners, Duke University’s official early-stage venture investment arm, provides capital and expertise to help Duke startups and features one of Duke’s most innovative experiential learning opportunities for students. As one of the largest and oldest university investment entities of its kind, Duke Capital Partners consistently places among the top five in North America.
About Merck Digital Sciences Studio
The Merck Digital Sciences Studio (MDS Studio, or MDSS) is a 10-month hands-on accelerator program providing mentorship, coaching, training, support, community, and investment to enable the next generation of innovative technologies for drug discovery and development. We invest in disruptive and innovative startups in digital biopharma by offering up to $150,000 via a SAFE and access to Microsoft’s Founders Hub resources, including up to $150,000 in Azure compute credits. The MDS Studio’s unique design and network empower startups to engage with industry-leading partners who take an active role in development.