DANNCE.AI, a Boston, MA-based company providing clinicians and drug developers a digital phenotyping platform, raised $2.6M in Pre-Seed funding.
The round was 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.
The company intends to use the funds to expand operations and its development efforts.
Led by CEO Rob Baldoni, 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. It can be used to diagnose patients, calculate the severity of their impairments, and monitor their change over time. Its behavioral quantification workflow, built on top of markerless pose tracking, recapitulates doctors’ findings and unlocks inaccessible clinical insights by analyzing gross and fine movement.
The 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. Dunn 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 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).