He keeps finding the person everyone forgot was in the room - and rebuilding medicine around them.
Same look an engineer gets right before he tells you the obvious thing everyone missed.
Dirk Soenksen runs Ceresti Health, a company in Carlsbad, California with a stubborn idea at its center: when someone has dementia, the most powerful and most ignored tool in the house is the spouse or adult child standing next to them. Ceresti turns that person - the family caregiver - into a trained, monitored, supported part of the care team, and it gets paid to do it through Medicare's GUIDE model.
In August 2025 the company raised $11.7 million to scale the platform. It is the kind of bet that only makes sense if you have spent a career noticing that the official patient is rarely the only one who needs help. Soenksen has built that bet twice.
We observed caregivers getting into an argument with the patient because the patient could not remember their name. We thought, this is not going to work if we cannot make the caregiver part of the solution.- DIRK SOENKSEN, ON THE PIVOT THAT BECAME CERESTI
In the late 1990s pathologists still leaned into microscopes the way their teachers had. Some, the story goes, sat on telephone books just to reach the eyepiece. Soenksen, an engineer, watched his own kids play Nintendo on bright high-resolution monitors and asked the question that would not let go: why can't microscopists look at computer monitors, too?
The answer took about eighteen months of intense work, much of it starting in a garage. Out of it came Aperio - Latin for "to reveal" - and a scanner that could digitize a tissue slide at half-micron resolution in roughly two minutes, around 900 million pixels of disease rendered as a file you could share.
He named it well. Aperio became the recognized global leader in digital pathology: about 200 employees, a thick portfolio of patents, multiple FDA clearances, and more than a thousand systems installed across 35 countries. In 2012, Danaher's Leica Biosystems acquired it. Four years later he founded the non-profit Digital Pathology Association, building the field's institutions after building its machines.
The insight wasn't a breakthrough in optics. It was a parent watching his children look at a better screen than the one doctors used, and refusing to accept the gap.
A company that took the pathologist's hidden glass world and put it on a monitor, where it could be measured, sent, and seen by more than one set of eyes.
Why can't microscopists look at computer monitors, too?- THE QUESTION THAT STARTED AN INDUSTRY
The day he left Leica, a former Aperio colleague named Kevin Liang - a neuroscientist - invited him for coffee. Liang argued that brain disease was the next great frontier, and talked about growing up with grandparents who had dementia. Soenksen, Liang, and fellow Aperio veteran Mark Wrenn founded Ceresti in 2013 with about $4 million from friends and family. All three had watched a parent or grandparent decline.
The first instinct was the obvious one: treat the patient. They built digital cognitive therapies for tablets and tested them in a memory-care facility. The results were good enough that Soenksen filed for a patent. Then they took the product into homes, where more than 80 percent of dementia patients actually live - and the plan fell apart in the most human way possible.
Overwhelmed spouses arguing with a parent who couldn't recall their name. The engineer did what engineers do when the data contradicts the design. He changed the design. Ceresti stopped building for the patient and started building for the caregiver: education, remote coaching, monitoring, and predictive analytics aimed at catching trouble before it becomes a hospital bill.
Three degrees, three disciplines: A.B. in chemistry from Bowdoin, a master's in electrical engineering from Penn, and an MBA from Pepperdine.
His first Ceresti product worked well enough to patent. He walked away from the strategy anyway - because it failed in real living rooms.
The spark for an entire industry was watching his kids play Nintendo on a sharper screen than doctors had.
Both of his companies reframed a disease by focusing on someone other than the obvious patient - first the pathologist, then the caregiver.
You need to integrate the digital-slide information with a hospital's laboratory information system, with the radiology system, and other systems. You will need all of those interfaces to enable sharing.- DIRK SOENKSEN, ON WHY HARD THINGS TAKE YEARS