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, Rob and the team licensed the DANNCE platform from both universities with the goal of 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 featured in the Boston Business Journal’s 2024 list of 25 Under 25.
“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.”
Shereen (COO) is a serial startup operator and an Entrepreneur-In-Residence at Harvard Business School. She previously co-founded Nth Party and Launch Angels which were both acquired. Joe (CTO) was previously Head of Engineering at Valo, and before that was the Director of Machine Learning at PathAI. Joe has an extensive software engineering background across many companies including Google for over a decade.
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 look forward to helping DANNCE leverage our visual tech domain expertise, decades of experience building businesses and our expert network in proactive healthcare.
