Currently, doctors use subjective questionnaires and observation to assess cognition. But the system is highly subjective and doesn’t enable clinicians to monitor symptom changes in between appointments. To make mental health assessments more objective and empirical, a UK-based healthtech startup thymia is building gamified AI tools to revolutionise the way people assess and monitor mental health.
$2.7M seed funding
In a recent development, thymia has snapped a $2.7 million in seed round to expand the reach and capabilities of its pioneering technology. The round was led by Kodori Ventures and joined by new and existing investors including Entrepreneur First, Syndicate Room’s Access, Calm/Storm and Form Ventures. Angels include Amanda M Cardinale and Nadav Rosenberg. thymia is also enabling individuals to join the round through a Crowdcube community fundraise.
While thymia is already being used for non-clinical mental wellness assessments, it will use the fresh funds to scale the technology in the clinical space through medical device approval. It will also be used to build out the AI infrastructure that powers the thymia platform and to develop the tool to detect the symptoms of ADHD.
With this round, the total funding raised by thymia to date accounts for $3.5 million. Also, the company will join a number of early-stage mental health innovation companies in the Kodori Ventures portfolio, including Clerkenwell Health.
thymia, which has already expanded into four new continents is now set to rollout its technology to be used across the UK, U.S., Spain, Brazil, Indonesia and Nigeria, with plans to expand to three more countries in 2023.
Dr Emilia Molimpakis, neuroscientist and co-founder and CEO at thymia, commented, “Our technology is revolutionary. By combining cutting edge neuroscience and ethical, explainable AI, we have built a tool that can help people get an accurate diagnosis and effective treatment plan in place faster than ever before. It’s all about arming clinicians with the very best tools so that they can do the very best by their patients. We’re so grateful for the support our investors have shown us so far; and we look forward to this next stage of our journey as we look to optimise and expand our technology and get it in the hands of the people who need it most.”
Alexander Kuznetsov at Kodori Ventures, stated: “Kodori Ventures is proud to be backing the team at thymia in their pioneering mental health work. With their recent expansion to four continents, they truly are a global force to be reckoned with in the field of mental health care, and I’m excited to see the impact of their work in the way we diagnose and understand mental health.”
Gamifies access to mental health with AI
thymia is a mental healthtech startup co-founded by neuroscientist Dr Emilia Molimpakis and theoretical physicist Dr Stefano Goria in 2020.
The thymia platform uses AI technology inspired by video games to transform the way we diagnose and monitor mental health conditions. Instead of answering subjective questionnaires, patients play specially-designed video games on the thymia platform which use cutting-edge neuropsychology, linguistics and machine learning to detect signs of mental illness as well as monitor whether patients are responding to treatment over time.
The thymia platform uses “multimodal” ethical AI to accurately spot mental health symptoms. Its AI models are the only ones globally that combine voice, video and behaviour data in this way. The models have been developed using thymia’s proprietary data set of over 1 billion data points collected from over 5000 individuals with depression, generalised anxiety, ADHD and health age-, gender- and language-matched controls: the largest dataset of its kind.
Currently, thymia presents up to 84% accuracy in detecting clinical depression and anxiety. thymia’s technology aims to enable clinicians to differentiate between different cognitive disorders which can present similar symptoms; such as dementia, depression and ADHD.
