Company leader
Cody Simmons, MS
CEO, Director, and Co-founder
DermaSensor
Cody Simmons is co-founder and chief executive of DermaSensor, the Miami, Florida company that makes an FDA-cleared handheld device for assessing suspicious skin lesions in primary care. He is a bioengineer who spent eight years taking the device from a laboratory instrument to FDA clearance.
Bioengineering at Brown and Stanford
Simmons earned a BA in economics and entrepreneurship, in the engineering track with a bioengineering focus, from Brown University, followed by an MSc in bioengineering from Brown. He did his graduate research in a biomaterials lab at Stanford University, according to DermaSensor's team page. He then worked in business development and commercial strategy at Genentech and led business development for a Silicon Valley medical device screening startup. He was included in the healthcare category of Forbes 30 Under 30.
Shrinking a 30-Pound Instrument
Simmons co-founded DermaSensor with Maurice Ferre, now its chairman, and has led it since 2016, building on spectroscopy technology licensed from Boston University. In a MedTech Digest interview, he said the original device was a 30-pound, microwave-sized instrument and that miniaturizing it took three and a half years, not the one year the team planned. The company ran 13 clinical studies before the FDA cleared the device in January 2024.
Simmons said many advisors and investors pushed the company toward dermatologists, and that he held to primary care because those doctors must decide every day whether to refer a mole. "Every person in the world, including Dermatologists, could get better at their job, but they're already quite good at assessing skin," he said.
Growing in Primary Care
Since launch, DermaSensor has sold through health systems and channel partners and has expanded into Europe after a Class IIb CE mark in June 2026. When it opened a public investment round in September 2026, Simmons told Refresh Miami that the company aims for $100 million in annual recurring revenue in 2031. "Primary care doctors testing for skin cancer will be the new normal," he said.