Theodoric Chew, co-founder and chief executive officer of mental health app Intellect

Intellect, a Singapore-based startup that wants to lower barriers to mental health care in Asia, says it has reached more than one million users just six months after launching. Google also announced today that the startup’s consumer app, also called Intellect, is one of its picks for best personal growth apps of 2020.

The company recently closed an undisclosed seed round led by Insignia Ventures Partners. Angel investors including e-commerce platform Carousell co-founder and chief executive officer Quek Siu Rui; former Sequoia partner Tim Lee; and startup consultancy xto10x’s Southeast Asia CEO J.J. Chai also participated.

In a statement, Insignia Ventures Partners principal Samir Chaibi said, “In Intellect, we see a fast-scaling platform addressing a pain that has become very obvious amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. We believe that pairing clinically-backed protocols with an efficient mobile-first delivery is the key to break down the barriers to access for millions of patients globally.”

Co-founder and chief executive officer Theodoric Chew launched Intellect earlier this year because while there is a growing pool of mental wellness apps in the United States and Europe that have attracted more funding during the COVID-19 pandemic, the space is still very young in Asia. Intellect’s goal is encourage more people to incorporate mental health care into their daily routines by lowering barriers like high costs and social stigma.

Intellect offers two products. One is a consumer app with self-guided programs based on cognitive behavioral therapy techniques that center on issues like anxiety, self-esteem or relationship issues.

The other is a mental health platform for employers to offer as a benefit and includes a recently launched telehealth service called Behavioural Health Coaching that connects users with mental health professionals. The service, which includes one-on-one video sessions and unlimited text messaging, is now a core part of Intellect’s services, Chew told TechCrunch.

Intellect’s enterprise product now reaches 10,000 employees, and its clients include tech companies, regional operations for multinational corporations and hospitals. Most are located in Singapore, Hong Kong, Indonesia and India, and range in size from 100 to more than 3,000 employees.

For many small- to mid-sized employers, Intellect is often the first mental health benefit they have offered. Larger clients may already have EAP (employee assistance programs), but Chew said those are often underutilized, with an average adoption rate of 1% to 2%. On the other hand, he said Intellect’s employee benefit program sees an average adoption rate of 30% in the first month after it is rolled out at a company.

Chew added that the COVID-19 pandemic has prompted more companies to address burnout and other mental health issues.

“In terms of larger trends, we’ve seen a huge spike in companies across the region having mental health and wellbeing of their employees being prioritized on their agenda,” said Chew. “In terms of user trends, we see a significantly higher utilization in work stress and burnout, anxiety and relationship-related programs.”

Intellect’s seed round will be used to expand in Asian markets and to help fund clinical research studies it is currently conducting with universities and organizations in Singapore, Australia and the United Kingdom.

DeepMind, the AI technology company that’s part of Google parent Alphabet, has achieved a significant breakthrough in AI-based protein structure prediction. The company announced today that its AlphaFold system has officially solved a protein folding grand challenge that has flummoxed the scientific community for 50 years. The advance inn DeepMind’s AlphaFold capabilities could lead to a significant leap forward in areas like our understanding of disease, as well as future drug discovery and development.

The test that AlphaFold passed essentially shows that the AI can correctly figure out, to a very high degree of accuracy (accurate to within the width of an atom, in fact), the structure of proteins in just days – a very complex task that is crucial to figuring out how diseases can be best treated, as well as solving other big problems like working out how best to break down ecologically dangerous material like toxic waste. You may have heard of ‘Folding@Home,’ the program that allows people to contribute their own home computing (and formerly, game console) processing power to protein folding experiments. That massive global crowdsourcing effort was necessary because using traditional methods, portion folding prediction takes years and is extremely expensive in terms of straight cost, and computing resources.

DeepMind’s approach involves using an “Attentionb-basd neural network system” (basically a neural network that can focus on specific inputs in order to increase efficiency). It’s able to continually refine its own predictive graph of possible protein folding outcomes based on their folding history, and provide highly accurate predictions as a result.

How proteins fold – or go from being a random string of amino acids when originally created, to a complex 3D structure in their final stable form – is key to understanding how diseases are transmitted, as well as how common conditions like allergies work. If you understand the folding process, you can potentially alter it, halting an infection’s progress mid-stride, or conversely, correct mistakes in folding that can lead to neurodegenerative and cognitive disorders.

DeepMind’s technological leap could make accurately predicting these folds a much less time- and resource-consuming process, which could dramatically change the pace at which our understanding of diseases and therapeutics progresses. This could come in handy to address major global threats including future potential pandemics like the COVID-19 crisis we’re currently enduring, by predicting viral protein structures to a high degree of accuracy early in the appearance fo any new future threats like SARS-CoV-2, thus speeding up the development of potential effective treatments and vaccines.

Drugmaker Moderna has completed its initial efficacy analysis of its COVID-19 vaccine from the drug’s Phase 3 clinical study, and determined that it was 94.1% effective in preventing people from contracting COVID-19 across 196 confirmed cases from among 30,000 participants in the study. Moderna also found that it was 100% effective in preventing severe cases (such as those that would require hospitalization) and says it hasn’t found any significant safety concerns during the trial. On the basis of these results, the company will file an application for emergency use authorization (EUA) with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Monday.

Seeking an EUA is the next step towards actually beginning to distribute and administer Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine, and if granted the authorization, it will be able to provide it to high-risk individuals in settings where it could help prevent more deaths, such as with front-line healthcare workers, ahead of receiving a full and final regulatory approval from the U.S. healthcare monitoring agency. Moderna will also seek conditional approval from the European Medicines Agency, which will enable similar use ing the EU.

Moderna’s vaccine is an mRNA vaccine, which provides genetic instructions to a person’s body that prompts them to create their own powerful antibodies to block the receptor sites that allows COVID-19 to infect a patient. It’s a relatively new therapeutic approach for human use, but has the potential to provide potentially even more resistance to COVID-19 than do natural antibodies, and without the risk associated with introducing any actual virus, active or otherwise, to an inoculated individual in order to prompt their immune response.

In mid-November, Moderna announced that its COVID-19 vaccine showed 94.5% efficacy in its preliminary results. This final analysis of that same data hews very close to the original, which is promising news for anyone hoping for an effective solution to be available soon. This data has yet to be peer reviewed, though Moderna says that it will now be submitting data from the Phase 3 study to a scientific publication specifically for that purpose.

Moderna’s vaccine candidate is part of the U.S’s Operation Warp Speed program to expedite the development, production and distribution of a COVID-19 vaccine, initiated earlier this year as a response to the unprecedented global pandemic. Other vaccines, including one created by Pfizer working with partner BioNTech, as well as an Oxford University/AstraZeneca-developed candidate, are also far along in their Phase 3 testing and readying for emergency approval and use. Pfizer has already applied with the FDA for its own EUA, while the Oxford vaccine likely won’t be taking that step in the U.S. until it completes another round of final testing after discovering an error in the dosage of its first trial – which led to surprising efficacy results.

AstraZeneca’s CEO told Bloomberg that the pharmaceutical company will likely conduct another global trial of the effectiveness of its COVID-19 vaccine trial, following the disclosure that the more effective dosage in the existing Phase 3 clinical trial was actually administered by accident. AstraZeneca and its partner the University of Oxford reported interim results that showed 62% efficacy for a full two-dose regimen, and a 90% efficacy rate for a half-dose followed by a full dose – which the scientists developing the drug later acknowledged was actually just an accidental administration of what was supposed to be two full doses.

To be clear, this shouldn’t dampen anyone’s optimism about the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine. The results are still very promising, and an additional trial is being done only to ensure that what was seen as a result of the accidental half-dosage is actually borne out when the vaccine is administered that way intentionally. That said, this could extend the amount of time that it takes for the Oxford vaccine to be approved in the U.S., since this will proceed ahead of a planned U.S. trial that would be required for the FDA to approve it for use domestically.

The Oxford vaccine’s rollout to the rest of the world likely won’t be affected, according to AstraZeneca’s CEO, since the studies that have been conducted, including safety data, are already in place from participants around the world outside of the U.S.

While vaccine candidates from Moderna and Pfizer have also shown very strong efficacy in early Phase 3 data, hopes are riding high on the AstraZeneca version because it relies on a different technology, can be stored and transported at standard refrigerator temperatures rather than frozen, and costs just a fraction per dose compared to the other two leading vaccines in development.

That makes it an incredibly valuable resource for global inoculation programs, including distribution where cost and transportation infrastructures are major concerns.

Welcome to TechCrunch’s 2020 Holiday Gift Guide! Need help with gift ideas? We’re here to help! We’ll be rolling out gift guides from now through the end of December. You can find our other guides right here.

Home exercise gear is always a nice holiday gift choice for anyone who has expressed interest in staying healthy and getting more fit, but during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic it’s more relevant than ever. Luckily, smart exercise and health gear is smarter than ever, making it perfect for the gift list this season.

Big machines

Bowflex Velocore bike

Image Credits: Bowflex

Bowflex’s latest excercise bike is a great follow-up to their solid C6, and it has a unique trick up its sleeve – leaning. The Velocore unlocks to allow side-to-side leans during workouts, which adds a good amount of core stabilization to your existing spin exercises.

The Velocore also offers an integrated display in either 16″ or 22″ sizes, and that provides access to Bowflex’s own JRNY video fitness instruction. It’s a great subscription service, though it doesn’t include live classes like Peloton. Luckily, Bowflex supports Peloton’s software as well, so you can also use that with the Velocore if that’s your preference.

Price: $1,699 (16-inch) or $2,199 (22-inch) from Bowflex direct or Best Buy

Hydrow rower

Image Credits: Hydrow

Rowers are a great way to get in some indoor cardio, and a nice change-up from treadmills and bikes that also works out your upper body. The Hydrow is the most technologically advanced of these out there, with a large, high-quality display that provides access to both live and on-demand classes via its virtual service. It’s also engineered to really feel like you’re getting the same kind of resistance you would from actual water.

Price: $1,995 (price as of publication) from Hydrow direct

Peloton Tread

Image Credits: Peloton

If you’re looking for a treadmill with smart features, Peloton’s is easily the best option available. The new Tread is the way to go for most, since it’s nearly $2,000 cheaper than the original which is now the Tread+, and it still offers a huge display for those interactive and on-demand peloton classes, and everything you need for a full-body workout as well. It’s not available in retail across the U.S. until March, but it’s a good advance gift if a treadmill is on the list.

Price: From $2,495 from Peloton direct

Smart and small

JAXJOX KettlebellConnect 2.0

Image Credits: JAXJOX

Smart weights come in a variety of shapes and sizes, but JAXJOX’s next-generation smart kettlebell is one of the all-around best and most convenient smart weights out there. The selectable weight ranges from 12 to 42 lbs, and the smart features on board provide real-time reporting on performance, along with the ability to sync with the JAXJOX mobile app for on-demand guided workouts.

Price: $229 from JAXJOX

Tangram Factory SmartRope Rookie

Image Credits: Tangram Factory

If you’re even more space constrained, a jump rope is essentially a whole-body gym in a tiny, portable package. The Tangram Factory Rookie is a more affordable, smaller and higher version of their original SmartRope, with built-in activity tracking, long-lasting battery, and a fully-adjustable rope length that allows it to be used by both children and adults of all sizes.

Price: Starting at $39.95 from Tangram Factory direct or Apple Store

Activity and health monitoring

Withings BPM Core wireless blood pressure monitor

Image Credits: Withings

The Withings BPM Core is a connected blood pressure monitor that provides a lot of extras, including measurement of your heartbeat with a digital stethoscope, and an electrocardiogram (ECG) feature to monitor for any potential atrial fibrillation. Withings is building all their hardware these days to clinical validation standards, so this is a surefire way to keep on top of these key signals of health.

Price: $250 from Withings (coming soon)

Withings Body Cardio

Image Credits: Withings

Withings is really nailing it with home health monitoring equipment these days, which is why the Body Cardio smart scale is another recommendation in this list. The Body Cardio not only measures weight, but also provides you with a body composition breakdown giving you approximate body fat percentage and body mass index for even more detailed fitness tracking. Plus, it monitors heart rate as well.

Price: $119.96 (price at publication) from Withings

A spate of startups focused on mental health recently made enough noise as a group that they caught the eye of the Equity podcast crew. Sadly, the segment we’d planned to discuss this topic was swept away by a blizzard of IPO filings that piled up like fresh snow.

But in preparation, I reached out to CB Insights for new data on the mental health startup space that they were kind enough to supply. So this morning we’re going to dig into it.

Regular readers of The Exchange will recall that we last dug into overall wellness venture capital investment in August, noting that it was mental health startups inside the vertical that were seeing the most impressive results.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

I wanted to know what had happened even more recently.

After all, Spring Health recently raised $76 million for its service that helps companies offer their workers mental health benefits, Mantra Health disclosed that it has raised $3.2 million to help with college-age mental health issues and Joon Care announced $3.5 million in new capital to “grow its remote therapy service for teens and young adults,” per GeekWire.

Sticking to theme, Headway just raised $32 million to build a platform that “helps people search for and engage therapists who accept insurance for payments,” according to our own reporting, and online therapy provider Talkspace is pursuing a sale — it looks like an active time in the mental health startup realm.

So, let’s shovel into the latest data and see if the signals that we are seeing really do reflect more total investment into mental health startups, or if we’re over-indexing off a few news items.

The state of mental health venture investing

To prepare the ground, let’s talk about the general state of healthcare investing in the venture capital world. Per CB Insights’ Q3 healthcare VC report, venture capital deal volume and venture capital dollar volume reached new record highs in the sector during Q3 2020.

The quarter’s 1,539 rounds and $21.8 billion in invested capital were each comfortably ahead of prior records set in Q2 2018 for round volume (1,431) and Q2 2020 for dollar volume ($18.4 billion) for healthcare startups.

Oxford University’s COVID-19 vaccine, being developed in partnership with drugmaker AstraZeneca, has shown to be 70.4% effective in preliminary results from its Phase 3 clinical trial. That rate actually includes data from two different approaches to dosing, including one where two full strength does were applied, which was 62% effective, and a much more promising dosage trial which used one half-dose and one full strength dose to follow – that one was 90% effective.

Oxford’s results may not have the eye-catching high efficacy headline totals of the recent announcements from Pfizer and Moderna, but they could actually represent some of the most promising yet for a few different reasons. First, if that second dosage strategy holds true across later results and further analysis, it means that the Oxford vaccine can be administered in lower amounts and provide stronger efficacy (there’s no reason to use the full two-dose method if it’s that much less effective).

Second, the Oxford vaccine can be stored and transported at standard refrigerator temperatures – between 35° and 45°F – whereas the other two vaccine candidates require storage at lower temperatures. That helps obviate the need for more specialized equipment during transportation and on-site at clinics and hospitals where it will be administered.

Oxford’s COVID-19 vaccine also uses a different approach to either Moderna’s or Pfizer’s, which are both mRNA vaccines. That’s a relatively unproven technology when it comes to human therapeutics, which involves using messenger RNA to provide blueprints to a person’s body to build proteins effective at blocking a virus, without any virus present. The Oxford University candidate is an adenovirus vaccine, which is a much more established technology that’s already been in use for decades, and which involves genetically altering a weekend common cold virus and using that to trigger a person’s own natural immune response.

Finally, it’s also cheaper – in part because it uses tried and tested technology for which there’s already a robust and mature supply chain, and in part because it’s easier to transport and store.

The Phase 3 trial for the Oxford vaccine included 24,000 participants, and it’s expected to grow to 60,000 by the end of the year. Safety data so far shows no significant risks, and among the 131 confirmed cases in the interim analysis that produced these results, none of those who received either vaccine dosage developed a severe case, or one requiring hospitalization.

This is great news for potential vaccination programs, since it introduces variety of supply chain into an apparently effective vaccine treatment for COVID-19. We’re much better off if we have not only multiple effective vaccines, but multiple different types of effective vaccines, in terms of being able to inoculate widely as quickly as possible.

Two of the companies behind one of the leading COVID-19 vaccine candidates will seek approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for emergency use authorization (EUA) of their preventative treatment with an application to be delivered today. Pfizer and BioNTech, who revealed earlier this week that their vaccine was 95% effective based on Phase 3 clinical trial data, are submitting for the emergency authorization in the U.S., as well as in Australia, Canada, Europe, Japan and the U.K., and says that could pave the way for use of the vaccine to begin in “high-risk populations” by the end of next month.

The FDA’s EUA program allows therapeutics companies to seek early approval when mitigating circumstances are met, as is the case with the current global pandemic. EUA’s still require that supporting information and safety data are provided, but they are fast-tracked relative to the full, formal and more permanent approval process typically used for new drugs and treatments that come before they’re able to actually be administered broadly.

Pfizer and BioNTech’s vaccine candidate, which is an mRNA-based vaccine that essentially provides a recipient’s body with instructions on how to produce specific proteins to block the ability of SARS-CoV-19 (the virus that causes COVID-19) to attach to cells. The vaccine has recently been undergoing a Phase 3 clinical trial, that included 43,661 participants so far. The companies are submitting supporting information they hope will convince the FDA to grant the EUA, including data from 170 confirmed cases from among the participants, and safety information actively solicited from 8,000 participants, and supplementary data form another 38,000 who that was passively collected.

While production is ramping globally for this and other vaccines in late stage development, and EUA will potentially open up access to high-risk individuals including frontline healthcare workers, it’s worth pointing out that any wide vaccination programs likely aren’t set to begin until next year, and likely later in 2021.

The clinical trial management software developer Medable has raised $91 million in a new round of financing as life sciences companies struggle with how to conduct the necessary validation studies of new drugs and devices in a pandemically challenged environment.

Digital and decentralized clinical trials are becoming a necessity given the health and safety guidelines that have been adopted to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, the company said. And those changes are driving a shift to services like Medable’s as companies move through the approval process, the company said in a statement.

The company’s new $91 million financing was led by Sapphire Ventures, with follow-on investment from existing investors GSR Ventures, PPD, Inc. and Streamlined Ventures.

Medable’s software manages recruitment, remote screening, electronic consent, clinical outcomes assessment (eCOA), eSource, telemedicine, and connected devices, the company said.

Its software is already being used to work on vaccines and therapeutics targeting COVID-19 specifically in addition to facilitating the development of other potentially life-saving therapies and treatments.

“The pandemic has made the world aware of the importance of clinical drug development,” said Dr. Michelle Longmire, CEO and co-founder of Medable, in a statement. “We need transformative technologies that break down critical barriers to improve patient access, experience and outcomes. This new funding will enable Medable to continue our aggressive pursuit of new technologies that improve clinical trials to benefit all patients.”

Trials underway in more than 60 countries are using the service and Medable has inked partnerships with companies like Datavant, to integrate multiple data sources for decentralized trials; MRN, to handle home and remote visits, and AliveCor, to track in-home health with electrocardiograms. 

Diagnoss, the Berkeley, Calif.-based startup backed by the machine learning-focused startup studio The House, has launched its coding assistant for medical billing, the company said.

The software provides real-time feedback on documentation and coding.

Coding problems can be the difference between success and failure for hospitals, according to Diagnoss. Healthcare providers were decimated by the COVID-19 outbreak, with hospitals operating below 60% capacity and one-fourth of them facing the potential for closing in a year if the pandemic continues to disrupt care.

The cost pressures mean that any coding error can be the financial push that forces a healthcare provider over the edge.

“For every patient encounter, a physician spends an average of 16 minutes on administration, which adds up to several hours every single day. In addition, codes entered are often wrong – up to a 30% error rate – resulting in missed or delayed reimbursements. We believe that, with the great progress we’ve seen with artificial intelligence and machine learning, we can finally address some of these inefficiencies that are leading to physician burnout and financial strain,”  said Abboud Chaballout, founder and chief executive of Diagnoss, in a statement.

Diagnoss acts like a grammar checking tool, but its natural language processing software is focused on reading doctor’s notes. The company’s tools can provide evaluation and management code for patient encounters; point out missing information in doctors’ notes; and provide predictions about the diagnosis and procedure codes that could apply after reviewing a doctor’s notes.

In a study of 39,000 de-identified EHR charts, the company found that its machine coding service was about 50% more accurate than human coders, according to a Diagnoss review.

Physician practices are already using Diagnoss’ service through a previously announced partnership with the mobile EHR vendor, DrChrono .

Now that we know the virus that causes COVID-19 can be transmitted via aerosol (tiny particles in the air that can hang around for a long time), researchers and engineers globally have turned their attention to helping promote air circulation where risk exposure is high, and also to kill any active viral particles that might be in the air. One such effort is the Nanowave Air, a device created by Pittsburgh-based Dynamics, Inc. (via NEXT Pittsburgh) which uses UV-C light in a safe and contained way to inactivate the virus in enclosed spaces.

The Nanowave Air operates on basically the same principal as any air purifier you might have in your home, using a fan to take in air and then passing it through a filter before putting it back out into the room. The difference is that the filter in this case is actually exposure to ultraviolet light – and specifically UV-C light, the type that has been proven to be effective in killing the SARS-CoV-2 virus that leads to COVID-19.

UV-C light differs from the more common UV-A light that we’re all generally exposed to in significant quantities from sunlight, and direct exposure to UV-C is harmful to humans. It has been used in indoor viral surface sterilization in the past, but typically the rooms where it’s used can’t be occupied at the time, and obviously it’s not effective once it’s no longer in use and people are allowed back in.

The Nanowave Air was created by the Carnegie Mellon spinout Dynamics when its CEO realized that the technology they were working on around UV-C light sources already for large-scale industrial applications could be adapted to address the COVID-19 crisis. That led to the portable design of the Air, which is roughly the size of a hobbyist telescope, and which works by containing the UV-C light within, and funneling air through it at high speeds using fans in order to be able to neutralize any active virus present while also allowing people to still continue to occupy the spaces where it’s in operation.

Nanowave Air is now shipping, with a $3,450 retail price. It’s intended for use in spaces like primary care facilities, dental offices, and other shared locations where people have to occupy the same space despite current guidance around social distancing and especially indoor exposure. The company, which has tested its technology at a number of labs across the U.S. including the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Vaccine Research, also announced that it’s now being used in some homes with a COVID-19-positive individual, in order to reduce the exposure potential for other members of the household who haven’t yet contracted the illness.

This week saw the announcement of positive news for two of the larger efforts to develop a vaccine for COVID-19, but even if those end up providing long-term protection and ramp distribution quickly, the effort to contain COVID-19 globally will still include a lot of necessary preventative steps to avoid contraction among the unvaccinated populace. Managing airborne presence of the virus is sure to be a key ingredient, and solutions like the Nanowave Air could help to spur those efforts.

Bond Vet, the NYC-based tech-forward veterinary startup, has announced the close of a $17 million Series A financing. The round was led by Talisman Capital Partners.

The startup has clinics across NYC that are meant to fill the gap between veterinary ERs and the veterinary equivalent of a primary care physician, modeling the business after CityMD. Unlike some other new veterinary startups, Bond doesn’t require a membership to book an appointment. Pet parents can either walk in or make an appointment on the website or mobile app.

The startup also provides both urgent care and primary care, including regular vaccinations and check-ups.

Bond puts a particular focus on the design of the clinic itself, with high-friction floors so puppies don’t slip and examination tables that give pet parents the ability to remain close to their furry friend during procedures or examinations when appropriate.

The company also has technology on the back-end for vets and nurses that make the process of providing care more efficient (like with note taking, for example) so that they can spend more time with the patients.

Bond has its own telehealth platform as well, to let pet parents text with their vet before and after appointments, or potentially even replace an appointment and solve the issue remotely.

Cofounder and CEO Mo Punjani explained that the efficiencies built in to Bond Vet allow the company to pass on savings to customers. While primary care services are on par with other vets, according to Punjani, emergency services can be rendered at a much lower cost than a traditional veterinary ER.

Pet spending is set to top $100 billion next year, according to the American Pet Products Association, as millennials opt to use higher-quality products for their animals. Startups across the pet ecosystem have capitalized on this new trend, and Bond Vet is among them.

The Bond Vet team, which includes in-clinic staff and HQ, is about 100 people, and 20 percent of employees are female.

Since launch in June of 2019, Bond has seen upwards of 15,000 unique pets in its clinics. The company plans to use the funding to keep building out its technology stack and expand its physical footprint, with plans to launch clinics in suburban areas next year.