National program alum DANNCE.AI announces close of 2.6M pre-seed funding
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. They are 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.
“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.”