London startup Thymia that uses video games to help doctors spot and treat depression picks $1.1M funding

Thymia, a London-based mental health startup that empowers clinicians to assess depression faster and more accurately, has secured £780K in the seed round.

The investment round was co-led by Kodori AG and Calm/Storm. Others including, Form Ventures, Entrepreneur First, and several angel investors, participated.

The funding will go towards scaling up its platform to assess for and monitor depression.

Thymia uses video games based on Neuropsychology alongside analyses of video and speech to make mental health assessments smart, starting with depression.

The online platform allows clinicians to make faster and more accurate clinical decisions by making mental illness as objectively measurable as visible physical conditions.

Neuroscientist Dr. Emilia Molimpakis and theoretical physicist Dr. Stefano Goria co-founded Thymia after a close friend of Emilia’s developed depression. The traditional depression assessment methods failed to convey the severity of her distress leading to a suicide attempt.

This led Emilia to leverage her understanding of Linguistics, Cognitive Neuroscience, and Experimental Psychology to build a platform that could supplement and in time replace the highly subjective questionnaire-based approach clinicians use with patients experiencing mental health difficulties.

Emilia and Stefano have created video game-style activities and challenges for patients to interact with, such as verbally describing animated scenes or interacting with moving objects.

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