MindLabs wants to change how we access mental health support

Heather Martin spoke to Adnan Ebrahim about his soon-to-launch mental wellness platform, and how his own journey led to this point

Adnan Ebrahim: ‘I always had that entrepreneurial itch’ (MindLabs)

Adnan Ebrahim is the founder and CEO of MindLabs, a mobile-first, video-led mental wellness platform launching at the end of January, directed primarily at working millennials. At 31, he’s only a young man. But don’t let this, or the fact that MindLabs is a start-up, mislead you. Ebrahim has been a successful entrepreneur since the age of 15.

MindLabs classes are led by a team of neuroscientists, psychologists, and breath work and mindfulness experts, and can be tapped into on demand or live-streamed from London straight to your phone: you can join from anywhere in the world, set targets and track progress as you would with a regular fitness app. Classes come under the broad headings of Stress and Anxiety, Sleep, Loneliness, Relaxation, Focus, and Energy, and promise “instant mood lift using positive action” or to “combat stress with the physiological sigh”. For now it’s a one-to-many format – only the instructor can be seen and heard – but Ebrahim is planning for two-way interaction as the product evolves.

“I always had that entrepreneurial itch,” Ebrahim tells me. It started in the playground, back at Hampton School in southwest London, when rubber wristbands were all the rage. Ebrahim paid a visit to his local Sports Soccer store, bought a job lot at a pound a piece, and sold them for ten pounds to his affluent peers. The only problem was the limited size of his market. Which is when he logged on to eBay, and first glimpsed the “financial potential” and “arbitrage opportunities” of the budding internet. It wasn’t long before he had accrued the handsome sum of £2,000 and was looking to reinvest. He’d mastered wristbands, he thought. “Can I master consumer electronics?” Which is when he logged on to Alibaba.