Partner Spotlight: Psylaris
Psylaris is a Dutch MedTech company and market leader in VR assisted mental healthcare, developing CE certified clinical VR therapy solutions for mental health professionals and institutions across Europe. Our blended care platform combines the Psylaris Dashboard with evidence based VR modules (EMDR ,Exposure, CGT enabling therapists to extend treatment beyond the therapy room so clients progress between sessions while clinicians stay fully in control
Our Story
Mental healthcare is under severe pressure: waiting lists stretch for months, therapist capacity is scarce, and clients often stall between sessions. We saw an opportunity to change that equation by giving therapists a clinically validated way to extend treatment beyond the therapy room, without compromising quality or adding workload. The challenge was clear. How could we help large GGZ institutions treat more clients with the same team, while meeting the strict clinical, regulatory, and data protection standards of professional healthcare? Our answer was Psylaris Care, a blended care platform combining a therapist dashboard with evidence based VR modules (starting with EMDR VR) so clients can continue structured, supervised therapy autonomously between sessions while clinicians stay fully in control. To prove the model in a real clinical setting, we collaborated closely with Mental Care Group (MCG / Mentaal Beter), one of the largest GGZ institutions in the Netherlands, which now runs approximately 100 Psylaris headsets across its practices. In their 2024 whitepaper on autonomous digital treatment interventions in GGZ, MCG reported that clients recover faster, experience greater autonomy in their treatment process, and that therapists are positive about the approach, with results described as promising enough to justify further scale up. Today Psylaris is the market leader in VR assisted mental healthcare in the Netherlands, with more than 116,000 therapy sessions delivered across our platform, and we are now scaling the same blended care approach across Europe.
Role of TFHC
We joined TFHC because we don’t want to figure out every new market on our own. Scaling mental healthcare innovation across borders is hard enough without reinventing the wheel in every country, and TFHC gives us the partners and local know how to move faster. Our goal is simple: get Psylaris into the hands of more therapists and clients across Europe, and doing that together with a strong network just makes sense.” Mike Verhiel, CEO, Psylaris
Results & Next Steps
Over the past eight years we’ve grown Psylaris into the market leader in VR assisted mental healthcare in the Netherlands, with more than 116,000 therapy sessions delivered across Dutch GGZ and our EMDR VR platform running at scale inside major institutions like Mental Care Group. Our EMDR Remote solution is now used by 9,000+ therapists worldwide, and we are already active across the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Ukraine, and the UK.
The biggest lesson is that you have to be in this for the long game. Winning in mental healthcare is not about moving fast and breaking things. It’s about building trust, and trust is built slowly, one clinician, one institution, and one evidence point at a time. Therapists need to see that you take clinical quality seriously, and institutions need to see that you stick around. Short term thinking simply doesn’t work in this sector, and we’ve learned to embrace that rather than fight it.
Our focus now is scaling Psylaris across Europe. The priority markets are Germany and the United Kingdom, where the combination of mental health capacity pressure, strong clinical infrastructure, and growing openness to digital therapeutics make VR assisted blended care a natural fit. We are also continuing our work in Ukraine, where the need for accessible, scalable trauma treatment is enormous and where VR based EMDR can make a meaningful difference at scale. Across all of these markets we are looking for clinical partners, institutional pilots, and distribution collaborations that can help us bring Psylaris Care to the therapists and clients who need it most
