As two leading entrepreneurs and investors in health technology companies, Dr. Maurice Ferre (Co-founder and Chairman) and Christopher Dewey (Co-founder) came to believe that skin cancer is primarily a public health issue that could be addressed by improving access to quality skin cancer care. Due to the limited number of dermatologists, their goal was to use cutting-edge spectroscopy and machine learning technologies to improve frontline providers ability to detect skin cancer early.

They founded DermaSensor in 2009 following discussions with Dr. Irving Bigio, Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Boston University and one of the top spectroscopy researchers in the world. Dr. Bigio is the original inventor and patent holder for Elastic Scattering Spectroscopy (ESS), a key technology employed by the DermaSensor device.

Since Professor Bigio's invention of ESS in 1994, there have been several hundreds of publications on ESS and over 30 publications on the use of ESS in clinical studies. DermaSensor began its own skin-specific studies using this technology in 2011 and began its first study on the current commercial device in 2018.