This startup wants to catch your depression before your boss does

Oluwabukunmi Victor Babatunde lost everything he’d saved in 2020, and almost lost himself soon after. The new job at a government tech agency should’ve been a fresh start, but the failed investment that wiped out his savings dragged him into a fog he couldn’t name. He’d show up to work, stare at his screen, and watch himself fail as it happened.

Depression wasn’t a word that felt available to him. “We are Africans,” he says. “We’ve been taught that mental health is not a thing.”

Luck intervened: a patient manager who refused to write him off, and a friend, & clinical psychologist Gbotemi Bukola Babatunde, who taught him the language of the fog and how to find his way back. Those interventions begged a larger question: “Why wait for rock bottom?”

Could a system flag mental health decline early enough to stop the crises from unravelling everything else?

Babatunde did not just recover—he helped build Sane, a mental health startup focusing on early detection rather than one-off therapy. Nigeria already has therapy apps, even if one session in Lagos can cost up to ₦15,000 ($10) to ₦50,000 ($34), putting it out of reach for many. Instead, Sane wants to step in earlier, spot mental strain through monitoring and simple alerts, so fewer people reach crisis and require expensive treatment. Babatunde estimates that, with reliable monitoring, as many as 80% of people who later seek therapy could be helped earlier.

It’s an ambitious premise: getting Nigerians to see mental-health checks as ordinary as checking blood pressure. That’s harder here. Blood-pressure monitors do not have to compete with the belief that prayer alone can fix everything, and they don’t rely on daily smartphone use that’s still expensive for many.

Sane launched about a year ago. Several hundred employees now use it through paid corporate plans as part of ongoing pilots with Nigerian companies. The product is live but remains behind a company waitlist, as the founding team is still proving it works at scale, and that pilot interest will grow into steady revenue.

Building a preventive mental health design

If Sane began as Babatunde’s personal recovery project, it’s now a small, deliberate system trying to make emotional health measurable. Babatunde’s experience is far from unique: more than one in ten Nigerians will meet the criteria for a mental disorder in their lifetime, with anxiety and depression leading the count, and most going untreated due to stigma, scarcity, and delayed help-seeking. Sane’s bet is simple: catching mental health decline early, before the crisis, can prevent most people from needing therapy at all.

The app uses lightweight daily check-ins through voice or text conversations that feel casual, not clinical. Underneath, it applies clinically validated assessment frameworks to track patterns over time. Studies reviewing dozens of trials suggest that clinically guided chatbots can ease depression and anxiety symptoms in short-term use.

When the system detects early signs of decline, it suggests evidence-backed early interventions designed to prevent distress from escalating. For cases requiring professional support, the platform connects users to human therapists through its partner network. High-risk situations are managed through clinically governed escalation pathways that prioritise immediate safety and access to crisis resources.

This rush toward digital confession highlights a key paradox: in a society defined by distrust in high tech and deep stigma, Netizens prefer confiding their deepest fears to anonymous Large Language Models (LLMs) over risking human judgment. Yet, this preference is an illusory safeguard. Most general-purpose AI is unregulated, storing user interactions for training and monetisation, effectively turning personal vulnerability into a scalable data asset. Sane’s counter-strategy is direct: by building around HIPAA-aligned privacy and security principles and offering explicit, enforceable guarantees of privacy, the company reverses this dynamic. As CTO, Boluwatife Adekola-Ojo affirmed, Sane makes confidentiality its non-negotiable key market differentiator, ensuring trust is built, not exploited.

The clinical grounding is embedded in the founding team. Gbotemi Bukola Babatunde, the psychologist who helped Babatunde recover, is chief clinical officer, ensuring the approach rests on psychological science rather than tech hype. CTO Boluwatife Adekola-Ojo built systems for MTN, Stanbic IBTC, and the World Bank, equipping Sane to function in low-bandwidth, cost-sensitive environments. Currently in pilot with a waitlist, the team is automating therapist handoffs and testing the model’s financial viability.

The ‘individuals won’t pay’ bet

Walk into any conversation about African mental‑health startups, and you’ll hear about therapy platforms: Blue Room Care, FriendnPal, MyTherapist. They connect people to clinicians, often as a premium service. Sane is tackling the problem from the front lines: Nigerians aren’t likely to pay out of pocket for mental‑health monitoring when rent and groceries are pressing.

Sane works with companies like Byte and Health Gap Africa, reaching over 2,000 people so far, mostly through organisational partnerships. Employers and HMOs can bundle Sane into benefits the same way health insurance became standard, spreading cost while embedding preventive care into daily life. “We believe that in the coming years, individuals will buy into our solutions,” Babatunde says, “but for now, our focus is on organisations directly.”

They are currently in talks with five HMOs. The pitch is familiar to anyone who’s worked in corporate health: catch mental‑health issues early, and you save money on therapy, absenteeism, and medical leave. It’s the same argument that took a decade to convince insurers for physical health, now being extended to emotional health.

Then there’s the cultural layer. “We are competing with the blood of Jesus,” Babatunde says humorously, but he’s not completely joking. Mental‑health stigma in Nigeria is also tangled with religious fatalism and the toxic notion that asking for help is weakness. “We’re competing with religious biases and the idea that you’re not tough enough if you have mental‑health issues,” he says. Still, he’s optimistic. “Ten years ago, offering HMOs seemed fringe. Today, a company without one looks unserious.” The same shift, he argues, is possible for mental‑health benefits, and Sane is betting on it.

The long game for Sane

Sane is still early. The founders only went full-time recently, after building it nights and weekends, and Babatunde is cautious about scaling too fast. “Scaling fast in terms of team members can kill a company. That was what killed the last one I built,” he says.

The app currently only works in English, which limits it to digitally savvy, urban users. The team is working on expanding access through localisation and lower-cost channels that can reach beyond smartphone-dependent populations.

Over the coming year, Sane is working to deepen integration with healthcare systems and partners while expanding accessibility across language and technology barriers. The ambition is clear: to build the infrastructure for preventive mental health in Africa, just as HMOs have become the standard for physical health over the last decade.

“We envision a future where people monitor their mental health before it escalates,” Babatunde says. “Everyone is on a mental-health journey even before they notice it.”