In Ramallah, a young woman opens an app on her phone, types in Arabic, and within minutes is matched with a licensed therapist she will never have to meet in person. For a population where stigma, cost, and a thin clinical workforce keep most people away from a counselor's office, that quiet transaction is the entire point of Hakini, the online mental health platform founded in 2019 by Majd Manadre and Sondos Mleitat [CB Insights].
The patient population Hakini is built for is broad and underserved: Arabic-speaking adults and adolescents living with anxiety, depression, trauma-related symptoms, and the daily psychological weight of life under occupation and displacement. According to the company, the majority of its users are women and teenagers, and it has served thousands of users to date, with hundreds of those users based in Palestine itself [LinkedIn] [ReliefWeb]. Its educational content has reportedly reached hundreds of thousands of people across the region [ReliefWeb].
The bet
Hakini is a marketplace for confidential teletherapy, layered with self-help interventions and what the company describes as evidence-based exercises and AI-driven guidance [CB Insights] [LinkedIn]. Users in Palestine, the UAE, Jordan, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States can book sessions with Arabic-speaking therapists, work through structured self-help modules between sessions, and access shorter-form psychoeducational content. The wedge is linguistic and cultural rather than purely technical: most global telehealth platforms operate in English, and the Arabic mental health vocabulary, idioms of distress, and clinician supply are different enough that a localized service has room to defend itself.
The business model is a two-sided marketplace, with Hakini recruiting and vetting therapists on one side and acquiring patients on the other. That is a familiar shape in digital health, and it carries the familiar tensions: clinician supply tends to be the gating constraint, and quality assurance is harder to scale than software. Hakini has not disclosed pricing tiers or session economics publicly, but the platform's positioning around accessibility, including subsidized access for Palestinians, suggests a blended model rather than a pure cash-pay consumer app.
Why it could be big
The standard of care for mental illness across most of the Arab world today is, for most patients, no care at all. Public mental health systems are under-resourced, private psychiatry is concentrated in a handful of urban centers, primary care physicians are rarely trained to manage common conditions, and stigma keeps many patients from seeking help even when services exist. Where care is delivered, it is still dominated by in-person psychiatric consultation and pharmacotherapy, with structured psychotherapy a relative rarity outside major cities. Against that baseline, an Arabic-language teletherapy service that meets patients on a phone is a meaningful clinical upgrade for the people it reaches, even before any AI features are layered on top.
The market tailwinds are real. Smartphone penetration across MENA is high, a generation of Arabic-speaking users has grown comfortable with telehealth since the pandemic, and regional regulators have generally been permissive toward cross-border digital therapy compared to the prescriptive frameworks the FDA and EMA apply to clinical software. Investor interest in the category is captured, in part, by Village Capital's decision to include Hakini in its Sustainability MENA 2021 cohort and to back the company at seed [Wamda, Oct 2021] [Village Capital]. Competitors Shezlong (Egypt), Labayh (Saudi Arabia), and Tanfees show that paying customers exist; the question is which platform builds the deepest clinician network and the most trusted brand in each national market.
| Company | Home market | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Hakini | Palestine | Arabic teletherapy, self-help, AI guidance [CB Insights] |
| Shezlong | Egypt | Arabic teletherapy marketplace |
| Labayh | Saudi Arabia | Arabic teletherapy marketplace |
| Tanfees | MENA | Arabic mental wellness |
The team and traction
Hakini was founded by Majd Manadre and Sondos Mleitat, who built the company out of Ramallah and have positioned it as the first Palestinian startup focused specifically on mental health and wellbeing [LinkedIn] [ReliefWeb]. The company closed a seed round in June 2021 on undisclosed terms [CB Insights], with Village Capital as a named backer through its MENA sustainability program [Wamda, Oct 2021]. Reported usage figures, while company-sourced, are consistent across multiple write-ups: thousands of registered users, hundreds of active Palestinian patients, and content reach in the hundreds of thousands [LinkedIn] [ReliefWeb]. Coverage in The National in late 2021 framed the company as one of the more visible consumer health startups to come out of the Palestinian ecosystem [The National, Nov 2021].
The honest counterfactual
The bear case is straightforward. The Palestinian operating environment is exceptionally difficult: Forbes reported in October 2023 that the war was already doing significant damage to the local startup ecosystem, with knock-on effects for hiring, payments infrastructure, and access to capital [Forbes, Oct 2023]. A small home market, a stigmatized category, and the constant possibility of disruption to operations are real headwinds, and larger regional competitors with deeper balance sheets could outspend Hakini on clinician acquisition in Gulf markets where willingness to pay is highest. The bull answer is that those same conditions are precisely what created Hakini's clinical mission and brand legitimacy, and that an Arabic-first product built for the hardest-to-serve patient population travels reasonably well to easier ones. The clinical need is not in dispute; the question is which team converts it into a durable business.
What to watch
The next twelve months will likely turn on three things: whether Hakini discloses or raises a priced follow-on round that signals the seed thesis is working, whether the company publishes any outcome data on its self-help and teletherapy interventions (peer-reviewed or otherwise), and whether it expands its clinician network meaningfully in Gulf markets where reimbursement and ability to pay are stronger. For a company treating anxiety and depression in a population the global health system has largely overlooked, those are the milestones worth tracking.
Pulse Raman covers biotech, digital health, and clinical AI for Startuply.