Effects, discerning pure/impure funcs (through effects, AFAIK), better type inference, sound type system, no null, no exceptions.
Honestly, just for the language I'd pick Flix over Scala.
Adding to that: effect inference and polymorphism, unboxed primitives, full tail call elimination, extensible records, first-class Datalog constraints, CSP style concurrency, a multitude of different design choices.
(I am one of the authors of Flix)
In that it's a totally different language?
FP and JVM doesn't mean Scala.
It looks and feels very much like Scala, in my opinion.