Maya

About Maya

Maya is an online health and well-being platform operated by Mayalogy Limited that connects users anonymously to doctors, counselors, and legal experts. Ivy Huq Russell founded the company in 2011, coming to health technology from a career in investment banking rather than healthcare or social work.

Before building a health platform, she worked in a field with almost no overlap with what Maya would eventually become.

From Investment Banking to Motherhood

Ivy Huq Russell built her early career as an investment banker before becoming a mother for the first time, an experience that shifted her attention toward the information gaps she encountered as a new parent in Bangladesh. In 2011, she founded Maya originally as a blog for mothers, a modest starting point for what would later become a much broader health platform.

That transition from finance to a maternal health blog wasn't a planned career pivot so much as a direct response to a problem she was living through personally, one that gradually expanded into a mission serving far more than new mothers alone.

A Name Rooted in Personal Loss

Ivy Huq Russell later renamed the platform Maya Apa, meaning "Sister Maya," naming it after her own mother, who fought breast cancer in 2009. That personal history shaped the platform's core mission: giving women a way to ask sensitive health, psycho-social, and legal questions without the stigma that often prevented them from asking in person.

The name carried real weight for her, turning a family health crisis into the identity of a company built to help other women avoid facing similar situations without support.

Partnering With BRAC

Ivy Huq Russell partnered with BRAC, one of the world's largest development organizations, to build out Maya's reach across Bangladesh. The service was built with a clear mission: giving women access to the information they needed, exactly when they needed it, regardless of where they lived in the country.

The Maya mobile app launched in February 2015 through that BRAC partnership, letting users post questions anonymously and receive answers within 48 hours, while the platform's machine learning systems routed each question to the right kind of expert, whether a doctor, counselor, or lawyer.

Solving for Anonymity First

Under Ivy Huq Russell's leadership, Maya built its entire product around anonymity as a core design principle rather than an afterthought, recognizing that many Bangladeshi women would simply not ask sensitive reproductive health or psycho-social questions if their identity was attached. That decision shaped everything from the app's question-routing system to how responses were delivered back to users.

Designing for anonymity from the outset, rather than adding privacy features after launch, meant every part of Maya's product, from onboarding to response delivery, had to work without ever identifying the person asking.

Scaling With International Investment

Maya later raised $2.2 million in seed funding to support regional expansion beyond Bangladesh, capital that let the company extend its anonymous health-information model to other emerging markets facing similar stigma-related barriers to healthcare access. That funding round validated a model built initially around a single founder's personal family experience rather than a broad market study.

Extending an anonymity-first model to new markets required adapting the platform's question-routing and expert network to different regulatory and cultural contexts, a more complex expansion path than replicating a purely commercial e-commerce or logistics product.

Where Maya Stands Today

Ivy Huq Russell continues to lead Maya today, having built a company whose entire reason for existing traces back to a deeply personal family health experience rather than a purely commercial opportunity. Employee reviews point to a moderate overall rating, feedback worth weighing against the platform's long operating history and its sustained partnership with BRAC.

More than a decade after its 2011 founding as a simple blog for mothers, Maya's evolution into an anonymous, AI-routed health and legal information platform reflects one of the more unusual founder-to-product journeys among the companies profiled in this directory.

Products

Maya's platform centers on anonymous health and well-being information rather than a single service line.

Anonymous Health Q&A is Maya's core service, letting users post sensitive health questions without attaching their identity.

Psycho-Social and Legal Question Routing extends the platform beyond health alone, using machine learning to connect users with counselors or legal experts as needed.

BRAC Partnership Network underpins Maya's reach across Bangladesh, extending the platform's access well beyond what a standalone app could achieve alone.

Across anonymous health Q&A, psycho-social and legal routing, and its BRAC partnership, Maya's platform reflects the stigma-free access mission that has defined the company since its 2011 founding, now operating as one of Bangladesh's longer-running digital health platforms.