Promena VR is the gold-standard for immersive Virtual Reality customized clinician guided psychotherapy.
The company's founder, Thomas Overly, is an adventurous, understated Midwestern Entrepreneur.
It was such a pleasure to interview him and his COO, Tanya Kelen.
Thomas has done an incredible amount boot-strapping in just 3 years. A business owner and inventor, Thomas has his hands full inventing, getting to market, hiring.
I’m always impressed with technical founders. Especially those willing to go the extra distance with fire and passion. Thomas has these qualities and more. His background in Gaming, programming and clinical practice is a perfect entry into VR for healing. Its almost like he was made to build his company.
Thomas seems to be on-fire with his combination of innovation, passion, and drive. Promena and VR Therapy clinic are the only commercially available solutions I know of both integrating Motion Capture, Facial Emotion Expression, and full-body movement into character-play for VR. There are academic solutions, and some military installations, but very few serving the commercial markets.
Promena VR has a distinct first-mover advantage. I am interested to see how they blend their current vast storehouse of creative assets, such as scenes, models, and character sketches across their initial specific market VR therapy for clinical applications and either broaden horizontally or pivot into other applications. Seems their core competencies of integrating and innovating motion capture and emotional expression in VR alone is a great leap. The most clear market sector to drive forward is their core competency Clinician-driven evidence-based VR psychotherapy. This alone is an emerging and highly effective method of solving really debilitating psychological disorders. The increase of visualization specificity for patients, and the speed of resolving disorders will be proven out more as the technology becomes more wide-spread. Of course, there are other players, and there will be many more. For now, they appear to be at the top of this watershed.
A question I like to surface in my interviews is: How can this technology get more distributed in modern healthcare systems? Promena is uniquely positioned technologically to push into large HMO’s and Hospitals/Clinical practices. Later, I can see their vision expanding out to more mobile-based headsets and verticalized market segments. For now, the Hospital.Clinic and B2B market seems the most promising. In a more mature market, they would have the ‘gold-standard’ commercially available software.
For more information about their clinic please see www.vrtherapy.org and for their licensable software, please see www.promenavr.com