Many of us know someone affected by Parkinson's or another movement disorder, and we’ve seen the challenges they face. Treatment for these conditions varies widely, depending not only on the specific diagnosis but also on how accurately symptoms are measured and monitored over time. Precise tracking of symptoms is essential to tailoring treatments effectively, helping doctors and patients better understand disease progression and response to therapies.

Clinicians currently lack tools for objective patient movement evaluation. They manually rate impairment on a 0-4 scale, leading to inconsistent scoring across doctors. This variability hinders clinical decisions and complicates assessing therapeutic efficacy. Advances in AI technology are now enabling more accurate, real-time tracking, paving the way for more personalized and effective care for those with movement disorders.

DANNCE.AI is bringing to market a novel phenotyping platform to digitize the clinical assessments used by clinicians and drug 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.

Team (from left to right): Tim Dunn (Chief Scientific Officer & co-founder), Suraj Dhulipalla (Software Engineer), Shereen Shermak (Chief Operating Officer), Rebekah Griesenauer (Head of Data), Joe Chan (Chief Technology Officer), Rob Baldoni (Chief Executive Officer & co-founder), Jesse Marshall (co-founder). Photo taken in September 2024 outside the team’s office in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The DANNCE platform has the potential to serve as both an endpoint for drug development and as an automated clinical assessment. The total addressable market as an endpoint and diagnostic for movement disorders and relevant neuropsychiatric indications (e.g. Autism, ADHD) is a $20B opportunity. Additionally, the economic burden of movement disorders and neuropsychiatric disease is over $2T, and the use of DANNCE in an upstream setting to better diagnose patients and to better manage them would also enable tremendous cost savings.

At LDV Capital, we invest in people building businesses powered by visual technology & artificial intelligence. We 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. We thrive on investing in people building innovative solutions that enhance people’s lives and provide substantial value.

We led their $2.6M pre-seed round along with co-investors Glasswing Ventures, The Leo Lion Company, Duke Capital Partners, and Merck Digital Sciences Studio.

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, 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.

This article was written in collaboration with Ash Cleary, an associate at LDV Capital.

LDV Blog