The Saudi platform that made mental-health care private, remote and Arabic-first - and put a therapist in the pocket of more than a million people.
In much of the Arab world, walking into a psychologist's office still carries a weight most people would rather avoid. Labayh's founder knew that weight personally - and built the workaround.
In 2016, Basim Albeladi was an engineer, not an entrepreneur. Then a motorbike accident in the United States put him in intensive care for a month. He recovered physically and returned home to Saudi Arabia, but the trauma followed him. Diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, he kept up therapy remotely with a US-based doctor, over a screen, from thousands of miles away.
That arrangement - private, remote, and effective - revealed a gap. Back home, seeing a mental-health professional in person meant confronting a cultural barrier. "When you physically go to a clinic in Saudi Arabia, there is a sort of cultural barrier," Albeladi has said. If remote therapy worked for him, it could work for a region where stigma kept millions from asking for help. In 2018, he launched Labayh.
The name is an Arabic expression of ready response - roughly, "here I am, at your service." The app does something simple and, in context, quietly radical: it lets an Arabic speaker book an anonymous therapy session with a licensed professional and have it conducted remotely, on their own terms. No waiting room. No name on a clipboard. No neighbor spotting them in the lobby.
Our goal is to positively impact people's lives. This is the most important thing.
What started as one man's workaround has become one of the region's largest digital mental-health services. Labayh reports more than a million users, a network of over a thousand licensed psychologists, psychiatrists and social specialists, and roughly 50 million minutes of counseling delivered. It carries accreditation from Saudi Arabia's Ministry of Health - a credential that matters enormously in a sensitive, regulated category.
Labayh is not a single feature. It is a stack of mental-health tools that meet users where they are - individually, in groups, or through their employer.
Anonymous, remote sessions with licensed psychologists and psychiatrists, booked and conducted entirely in-app in Arabic.
Group guidance, support communities, webinars and workshops that make care less isolating and more affordable.
Structured programs for depression, social anxiety, panic disorder, OCD, trauma, anger, self-esteem, resilience and elderly support.
In-app psychological self-assessments and screening tools for anxiety, depression, PTSD and more.
A corporate wellbeing program that gives employers mental-health benefits aimed at retention, skills and productivity.
300+ meditation and wellbeing audio clips for stress, sleep and relaxation, added through the acquisition of UAE app Nafas.
The clearest measure of a therapy platform is not downloads - it is time spent in actual sessions. Labayh's curve tells the story of demand that was always there, waiting for access.
Mental-health need in the region was never in short supply. What was missing was a private, credible, culturally comfortable way to seek help.
Labayh's central bet is that stigma is a design problem as much as a cultural one. By stripping away the parts of care that trigger discomfort - the physical clinic, the visible identity, the language mismatch - it made asking for help feel private. Anonymity is arguably its most important feature, not its video calling.
That framing also explains the company's difference from generic wellness apps. Labayh sits between a meditation app and a hospital: it is clinical enough to be Ministry of Health-accredited and staffed by licensed professionals, but consumer enough to live comfortably on a phone. Where global meditation apps like Calm or Headspace sell relaxation, and where in-person clinics sell treatment, Labayh delivers licensed treatment through a consumer product built Arabic-first.
When you physically go to a clinic in Saudi Arabia, there is a sort of cultural barrier.
Early on, the hard part was supply: convincing enough therapists to join a young platform. As demand became visible, that flipped. Today the company reportedly maintains a waitlist of specialists wanting in - the clearest sign a two-sided market has tipped.
Labayh runs a dual model - selling to individuals and to employers - that lets each side reinforce the other.
Individuals pay per session or subscribe for therapy, group programs and self-help content. This is the top of the funnel and the source of trust and word of mouth.
Companies buy the Labayh Business Program to offer employees confidential mental-health support - framed around retention and productivity, not perks.
Beyond core therapy, Labayh layers in family and social counseling, nutrition and fitness coaching, widening the definition of wellbeing it serves.
In a stigmatized category, education is acquisition. Labayh's "Your Mental Health Matters More" awareness initiative alone pushed the platform past a million users.
A motorbike crash in the US lands Basim Albeladi in the ICU for a month; PTSD follows, treated remotely once he returns home.
Albeladi releases the Labayh telemedicine app, offering anonymous, Arabic-language therapy.
The platform reaches roughly 250,000 consultations - about a million minutes of therapy.
Labayh closes a seed round led by 500 Global and crosses 10 million minutes of therapy delivered.
Full acquisition of Abu Dhabi meditation app Nafas adds a 300+ clip library; user base nears 1.2 million.
Basim Albeladi's background is engineering, not clinical psychology - and that shapes Labayh. The company pairs a product-and-infrastructure mindset (its stack spans Kubernetes, Google Cloud, Terraform and modern observability tooling) with clinical governance handled by its network of licensed specialists and its Ministry of Health accreditation. The founder supplies the lived understanding of the problem; the professionals supply the care.
That combination is Labayh's expertise: operating a regulated, sensitive health service at consumer-app scale, in Arabic, across multiple MENA markets. Few competitors combine clinical credibility, cultural fluency and technical scale in the same product.
The founder discusses stigma, access and the mission behind Labayh in this Expo Dubai conversation.
Interview & podcast: virtualexpodubai.com/listen-watch/podcasts/basim-albeladi-advocating-for-mental-health-in-saudi-arabia · Product demo: search "Labayh app" on Google Play & the App Store
Labayh is a Saudi digital mental-health platform that connects Arabic-speaking users with licensed psychologists, psychiatrists and counselors for private, remote therapy via its mobile app.
It was founded in 2018 by Basim Albeladi, an engineer-turned-entrepreneur, after his own experience with PTSD following a 2016 accident.
Yes. Labayh is accredited by Saudi Arabia's Ministry of Health and works with over 1,000 licensed specialists.
It offers support groups, webinars and workshops, structured therapeutic programs, self-assessment tools, a corporate wellbeing program, and a meditation library from its Nafas acquisition.
Labayh has surpassed 1 million users (later cited around 1.2 million) and reports roughly 50 million minutes of counseling delivered.
Sources: Wamda · Saudipedia · The Startup Scene · YourStory · Eye of Riyadh · Zawya · Crunchbase · MAGNiTT · Al Maktoum Initiatives. Figures are approximate and drawn from public reporting.