Ivy Huq Russell

About Ivy Huq Russell

Ivy Huq Russell is the Founder and CEO of Maya, an online health and well-being platform operated by Mayalogy Limited that connects users anonymously to doctors, counselors, and legal experts. Before building a health platform, she worked in a field with almost no overlap: investment banking.

From Investment Banking to Motherhood

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.

A Name Rooted in Personal Loss

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 Russell, 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

Russell partnered with BRAC, one of the world's largest development organizations, to build out Maya's reach across Bangladesh. As The Daily Star reported at the time of its expanded launch, the service was built with a clear mission: giving women access to the information they needed, exactly when they needed it.

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 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.

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.

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.