Six Black Friends. Twenty Years. One Mental Wellness App.
The six Black people who built Daylogue have been in each other's lives since middle school. They grew up, went their separate ways, and came back together to build the mental wellness app they needed at thirteen, and the one the Black community has been waiting on since wellness tech became a category.
LOS ANGELES, CA, May 19, 2027 / PRNewswire / — Daylogue, the pattern journal that reads your past entries and tells you what it notices, today shared the story behind its team. Founder and CEO Brandon Bibbins built the company's founding team out of the five Black friends who have been in his life since middle school. All six are now in leadership or advisory seats at the company. All six are Black. The product they built together is rooted in a community the wellness industry has largely designed around, not for.
The numbers on Black mental health in America are familiar and they have not moved much. Only around 4% of licensed psychologists in the United States are Black. Less than 2% of psychiatrists are. Black Americans are more likely to experience serious psychological distress than white Americans, and more than half as likely to receive treatment for it. Therapy is expensive, in-network options are thin, and the cultural distance between a Black client and a therapist who has never sat at a Black family's table can be wide enough to end the work before it starts. Mental wellness apps were supposed to help close this gap. Most of them have been designed in cultural and clinical contexts that did not start with the Black experience in mind, and it shows in the product, in the stock photography, in the language the AI uses, in the examples the onboarding flow gives, in whose lives the feature set was built to fit.
Daylogue was not built that way. Bibbins is the sole founder and CEO. The five people he built the founding team around are LaShawn M., Founding Head of Brand and Growth; Marcus M., Founding Head of Strategy and Partnerships; Cam E., Founding Strategic Advisor; Christopher Lewis, Ph.D., Clinical Advisor; and Dominique Wright, Founding Team. Bibbins has known each of them since middle school. They grew up alongside him, went to different colleges and different cities and different careers, and stayed in each other's lives for twenty years. When he started sketching what became Daylogue, the first people he called were the same five friends who had been on the other end of the group chat since he was thirteen.
"The first draft of Daylogue didn't have a single outside investor. It had five of my oldest friends," said Brandon Bibbins, Founder and CEO of Daylogue. "People I've known since I didn't know how to be a person yet. We grew up in the same orbit. We saw each other's families. We've been talking to each other about what was wrong for twenty years, and all of us had, in one way or another, had to figure out how to take care of our mental health without the tools that are supposedly available. Building this with the people who have known me the longest wasn't a branding decision. It was the honest version of who was going to build it."
What that shapes, at the product level, is specific:
- A journal that reads you without flattening you: Daylogue's AI is trained and clinically reviewed with an eye toward the cultural specificity of how people actually talk. It doesn't translate "I'm tired" the same way a wellness app written by people who didn't grow up in the Black community would have translated it, and the founding team has been deliberate about that from day one.
- No performative Blackness, no stock photography: the product is not decorated with Black imagery to look inclusive. It was built by a Black founder with a Black founding team, for users of every background, with their own lives in the room at every product decision.
- Built for the moment before therapy, not instead of it: Daylogue is not therapy and is clear about that. But for users who cannot easily access a culturally competent therapist, a problem Black users face at higher rates than any other group, Daylogue is built to be useful in the meantime, and to give users something they can bring into the therapist's office when they finally find one.
- Privacy as cultural trust: Black users have historically had reason to be more careful than average about what they tell a stranger's database. Entries written in the Daylogue app are end-to-end encrypted on the user's device before upload, so Daylogue cannot read those. SMS and email check-ins, and the AI summaries Daylogue generates, are handled on the server and encrypted at rest. The privacy map is published in full on daylogue.io/privacy.
- A company that keeps showing up: Daylogue commits a portion of revenue each year to Black mental health organizations working on access and cultural competency. That is not a launch detail. It is a standing line item on the company's operating budget.
"A lot of companies in this space have a diversity page," said LaShawn M., Founding Head of Brand and Growth at Daylogue. "We have a diversity origin story. The six of us weren't assembled through a founder mixer or a recruiter. We've been in each other's lives since we were thirteen. The product we built together looks like that, like something people who actually grew up alongside each other would build for other people who want a tool that understands them. That's different. And for a lot of our early users, it's why they picked us."
Daylogue is live on iOS via the App Store and on the web at daylogue.io. Android is in active development. Access for schools, workplaces, and clinical support teams is available at daylogue.io/enterprise.
Daylogue is not therapy and is not a replacement for professional care. It is a daily reflection tool designed to sit alongside therapy, community, faith, and whatever else users rely on to take care of themselves.
About Daylogue
Daylogue is a pattern journal that reads your past entries and detects the emotional patterns running through them. Instead of a stack of separate journal entries, you get a short, plain-language summary that updates over time: what topics keep coming back, when a pattern is repeating, what's shifted in the last few weeks. Daylogue is not therapy and is not a replacement for professional care. It is a private space on your phone for honest reflection, a companion to therapy, to hard conversations, and to the days when you want to know yourself a little better. Entries written inside the Daylogue app are end-to-end encrypted on your device before upload, so Daylogue cannot read them. (SMS and email check-ins, and AI-generated summaries, are handled on the server and are not end-to-end encrypted. See Daylogue's privacy page for the full map.) Founded by Brandon Bibbins, Daylogue is independent and available on iOS and web at daylogue.io.
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