oVRcome: Virtual Reality Revolutionizing Mental Health
Kia Ora friends!
Event: NZVC’s STARTUP LESSONS FROM THE EDGE
NZVC hosted a stimulating session on NZ Startup Ecosystem as part of EHF Hui on August 8th in Wellington. The fireside chat profiled NZVC’s ethos, experience, and lessons from starting a venture fund in New Zealand.
General Partner Mark Pavlyukovskyy and Venture Partner Andre Rowell interviewed the following three founders covering themes of leveraging machine learning for human wellbeing, commercialising academic research for global scale, the speed of decision making, and the trade-offs between growth and equity dilution.
Janine Grainger is the co-founder and CEO of Easy Crypto, a New Zealand cryptocurrency trading platform that attracted 150,000 customers across New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, and Brazil, and recorded over $1.1 billion in sales in its first 3 years.
Aleks Dahlberg is harnessing the myriad of behavioural breadcrumbs collected every day on our mobile devices to provide insights for our mental health with his company Sahha.
Asa Cox is working to make machine learning more accessible to mid-size enterprises with Arcanum. Using its applications and a low-code platform for custom solutions, it enables data teams to rapidly deploy applications and models.
Dr. Elizabeth Berryman is the founder & director of chnnl, a start-up with a mission to engage employees and monitor personal mental well-being and provide direct feedback enabling management to take action in real-time.
Startup of the month: oVRcome
Founded by Adam Hutchinson, oVRcome uses the power of virtual reality to provide exposure therapy as a treatment for phobias and social anxiety in the privacy of one’s own home. The tool is a valuable addition to the work therapists do with their clients by providing graded exposure content using videos and scripted imaginal rehearsal. The software dashboard lets the therapist build customized hierarchies, monitor progress in real time, and see how much time was spent in VR environments.
The immersive VR environment can tease out facets of a client’s fears that that might not have emerged using traditional rehearsal methods. Also, clients report great benefit from repeated exposure to simulations at home. This access to repeated immersive experience outside of the therapy of sessions serves as a bridging tool to the ultimate goal of normalizing the relationship with the real life challenge that must be faced without the assistance of a therapist.
oVRcome recently published the results of their extensive clinical trial in Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry which can be read here. This resulted in a large amount of media attention at Guardian, One News, and RadioNZ and a big boost to organic traffic on their website. Adam and oVRcome are recipients of numerous awards in the health tech innovation space.
NZVC is excited to be an investor in both the pre-seed and seed rounds of this exciting mental health startup! Please let us know if you want to learn more about their current seed round.
Best regards,
Mark Pavlyukovskyy, Ajay Gupta, and Glen Anderson