dementia-care
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Dan Thomson
Dan Thomson is the founder and CEO of Sensay, an AI platform that builds digital replicas - interactive clones trained on a person's voice, knowledge, and personality. A philosophy graduate turned restaurateur turned Web3 marketer, he started Sensay in 2023 after a head injury wiped out his memory and dementia took hold of people he loved. His pitch is blunt: capture what a human knows before it is gone, and let that knowledge keep working - for families, for companies, and for anyone who wants a version of themselves that never logs off.
Dirk Soenksen
Dirk Soenksen is the co-founder and CEO of Ceresti Health, a Carlsbad, California digital-health company that treats the family caregiver as the unit of care for people living with dementia. An engineer by training, he first reshaped a corner of medicine by founding Aperio, the company that turned the glass microscope slide into a digital image and became the global leader in digital pathology before Danaher's Leica Biosystems acquired it in 2012. A coffee on his last day at Leica sent him into a second act: instead of imaging the brain, he set out to support the overwhelmed spouses and adult children caring for it.
David Werdegar
Dr. David Werdegar, MD, MPH is the former President and CEO of Institute on Aging (IOA), San Francisco's leading nonprofit dedicated to helping older adults and adults with disabilities live with dignity and independence. A physician trained at New York Medical College and UCSF, Werdegar transformed IOA from a community program into a comprehensive elder-care organization serving thousands annually across the San Francisco Bay Area. Under his watch, IOA opened a landmark 50,000-square-foot campus on Geary Boulevard in 2011, consolidating programs spanning home care, dementia day enrichment, and the 24/7 Friendship Line warmline. He retired in 2022 after steering the organization to nearly $100 million in annual revenue with a staff of around 900.
George Netscher
George Netscher is the Founder and CEO of SafelyYou, a San Francisco-based AI company that uses computer vision to prevent falls and elevate dementia care across senior living communities. Netscher launched the company in 2015 as doctoral research at UC Berkeley's AI Research Lab, driven by his family's direct experience with Alzheimer's disease - his grandmother and aunt both had the condition, and his mother cared for them while working as a physician. SafelyYou's ambient sensor platform now serves nearly 1,000 senior living communities, has raised over $134 million in total funding including a $43 million Series C in 2025, and has been shown to reduce falls by 40% and fall-related ER visits by up to 80%. In May 2025, Netscher was elected to the Argentum Board of Directors, the leading national senior living industry association.
Joy Zhang
Joy Zhang is the CEO and Co-Founder of Mon Ami, a San Francisco-based healthtech company building HIPAA-compliant SaaS for agencies that serve older adults and people with disabilities. A Stanford MBA who has volunteered in hospice and dementia care since high school, Zhang co-founded Mon Ami in 2018 after interviewing 150+ seniors and caregivers to understand what the system was missing. Today Mon Ami is used by government agencies and nonprofits across the US, helping them replace manual paperwork with automation - so their staff can focus on care instead of administrative burden. The company has raised over $12M and grown to 180 employees, making it one of the most visible startups in the aging-services technology space.