A London-based mental healthtech startup Thalamos, which aims to digitise the Mental Health Act, has raised $1 million in seed funding. The investment round was backed by Ascension’s Conduit Impact EIS Fund (which also backed Foodsteps) and angel investors, including Syndicate Room, and a private Seedrs crowdfund.
Supports mental health care providers
This investment comes at a crucial time, with the number of people being sectioned under the Mental Health Act is continuing to rise. The funding will be used by Thalamos to expand their team and strengthen their product, helping them to support a growing number of mental health care providers as they work to better support patients, clinicians and systems.
Founder Arden Tomison of Thalamos said, “At Thalamos, we’re working closely with mental health care providers across England to deliver a fully digitised solution which makes access to acute care swifter, simpler and safer. This is helping practitioners speed up the arrangement of patient admission, treatment and transfer, while increasing data security and care quality. We’re so grateful to our amazing group of investors for supporting us to expand our work to optimise the care accessed and received by a growing number of mental health care patients.”
Hadley Diest, Investment Manager at Ascension, will join Thalamos’ board as an independent advisor. She commented, “Acute mental health care is an immense challenge in the UK – it is both traumatic for patients, and also hugely time-consuming and disjointed for the various stakeholders providing care. Thalamos’ groundbreaking digital workflow tool enables those involved in patient intake, treatment, discharge and ongoing support to work together more seamlessly than ever before, ultimately leading to better patient outcomes and more efficient collaboration between the NHS, police, care providers and regulators.
Digitises mental healthcare
Founded in 2018 by cousins – Arden and Ross Tomison, Thalamos was inspired by the experience of a close friend who was sectioned.
Countless paper forms had to be circulated and approved before his care could begin, leaving him waiting too long for help whilst in crisis. Determined to create a kinder, safer and more efficient way for people to access acute mental health care, Arden and Ross set about designing a digital solution to provide a quicker, safer route to this vital care.
The Thalamos platform provides digitised versions of the forms required for admission, treatment, transfer and discharge under the Mental Health Act. Thalamos already works with seven mental health care providers, giving over 40,000 practitioners access to the digital tools needed to speed up access to care for those in crisis. Using Thalamos instead of paper-based processes is reducing the risk of error by up to 89%.
