On Tuesday, VR behavioral well being platform BehaVR and OxfordVR, a VR platform for extreme psychological well being points, introduced their merger. The businesses say their mixture creates the biggest digital actuality healthcare supply platform.

The businesses, which is able to unite underneath the BehaVR model, additionally garnered $13 million in Collection B funding to help the merger. The spherical was led by Oxford Science Enterprises and Optum Ventures, with participation from Accenture Ventures, Confluent Well being, Thornton Capital and Chrysalis Ventures.

BehaVR’s founder CEO Aaron Gani will lead the brand new firm and its management staff, which is able to embody Dr. Daniel Freeman, a psychiatrist, researcher, writer and OxfordVR’s founder. 

WHAT IT DOES

Tennessee-based BehaVR presents psychological and behavioral well being prescription digital therapeutics, together with therapies for stress, ache, anxiousness and habit. The corporate additionally makes use of biometrics and machine studying fashions in its choices.

England-based OxfordVR, a spinout of the College of Oxford, develops immersive therapies for psychological and behavioral well being points. OxfordVR was constructed on 20 years of analysis carried out by Freeman on the College of Oxford, the place he studied the potential of VR in creating automated psychological therapies.

In June, the corporate received FDA Breakthrough Device designation for its gameChange platform, which makes use of automated VR-based cognitive behavioral remedy to deal with extreme psychological well being circumstances. 

“The demand for psychological well being providers far outstrips obtainable assets. Suppliers need assistance, and that assist is on the market immediately by means of our clinically-validated and evidence-based digital applications,” BehaVR’s Gani stated in a press release. “In bringing collectively two modern digital actuality therapeutics groups, we’re positioned to serve the widest vary of affected person populations doable at a time of intense want.”

MARKET SNAPSHOT

In 2021, BehaVR and Japanese company Sumitomo Pharma signed a possible $163 million deal to create VR therapies to deal with social anxiousness dysfunction, generalized anxiousness dysfunction and main depressive dysfunction.

The partnership features a multiproduct, ​​multi-DTx deal, and is among the largest collaborations between a pharma firm and a VR agency in historical past. 

OxfordVR launched into the digital well being scene in 2007. Together with gameChange, the corporate created OVR social engagement, designed to deal with varied psychological well being circumstances related to sure kinds of anxiousness, together with anxiousness that accompanies agoraphobia, despair and schizophrenia.