Bliss builds a crucial therapist marketplace for diaspora communities, starting with Albanians abroad

Accessing mental health support is not easy. For millions, especially those living away from their home countries, the barriers can feel insurmountable, including language, cost, cultural differences, stigma, and endless waiting lists.

Albanian Jona Doda, co-founder and CEO of Bliss, knows the problem all too well. 

Following studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science, Doda worked for over 10 years in tech startups in growth and marketing leadership roles.

She admits that her mental health journey "started years ago when I left Albania to pursue opportunities in the UK.”

“Over time, I realised how much we carry with us. Not just our hopes, but our struggles, too.

That realisation inspired me to combine my background in startups and marketing with my passion for mental health to build something meaningful."

Therapy for the Albanian diaspora

Doda is the CEO and co-founder of Bliss, an online therapy platform for Albanians abroad, connecting users with qualified psychologists. 

Countries like Albania that have large diaspora communities. The Albanian population in Albania is 2.7 million, but globally, it is 10 million. 

According to Doda:

"Many struggle to find therapists who speak their language and understand their culture. Sometimes the language barrier is not the most important, but it's the cultural context. "

Culturally rooted, accessible, and affordable

Bliss was born out of a simple but urgent truth: diaspora communities are too often left out of mainstream mental health solutions. Language barriers, cultural stigma, high costs, and unfamiliar systems create invisible walls. 

Bliss' psychologists can support people facing a wide range of life challenges, including family and relationship issues, persistent low mood or lack of energy, ongoing stress, unexplained health concerns, and financial and career challenges.

Bliss offers low-barrier, culturally rooted, and affordable mental health support, especially for first- and second-generation migrants.

From trauma-informed therapy to AI culturally sensitive therapist matching, our platform is built by and for our community, centring inclusivity, accessibility, and joy over clinical labels or one-size-fits-all models.

A lack of publicly available services and price-prohibitive private services means that many Europeans wait months for support. 

Doda notes that "unfortunately, a lot of people—especially when it's their first time trying therapy—it's usually their last resort. And they can't afford to wait such a long time. They need immediate help."

As an Australian migrant living in Berlin myself — a city infamous for its long waiting lists for mental health support — I like most, pay over €500 a month in mandatory health insurance, yet navigating the system to find a psychologist accepting new patients is a bureaucratic maze, that would be undoubtedly harder for people in mental health crisis to navigate.  

The shortage of trained professionals is so severe that an underground market has emerged. Like many others, I've in the past resorted to paying out of pocket for private online therapy. 

Although there are many major players out there like BetterHelp and Talkspace, they don't cater for cultural sensitivity or niche languages such as Albanian.

Bliss offers a competitive advantage to these online platforms as it starts from just €30 a session, around half the price of a service like Bettahealth. 

Therapists eager to serve Albanian diaspora communities

Psychologists are selected using a multistep process led by a senior recruiter. According to Doda, the onboarding process takes time "because we want to make sure we're onboarding high-quality therapists."

"You can build the best tech infrastructure, but if your therapists aren't proper, empathetic professionals, it won't work."

Currently, Bliss has about 30 psychologists on the platform with around 50 more on the waitlist.

Doda admits, "It's interesting, when we first launched, we saw we had demand from customers, but also a long waitlist of therapists who wanted to join. "

"Therapists love the flexibility of Bliss. It's a new channel that provides exposure and new clients."

Sessions between therapists and customers are entirely private, although Bliss can access anonymised usage data, which shows that apart from the most common global themes like depression and anxiety, for migrants it's predominantly social isolation, problems with cultural identity or not feeling like they belong in the new country.

"But when they go back home, they also don't feel like they belong there either. So it's like almost a state of always being on the plane, not belonging anywhere. Cultural adaptation without compromising your core identity is a big theme."

Why cultural understanding matters

Further, Doda notes that feedback from users who have tried therapy before with providers in the countries they live in revealed that "foreign therapists often struggle to understand the cultural nuances." 

“It would take a British therapist 10 sessions to understand Albanian family dynamics.

Cultural sensitivity is super important. Even recent studies show that it's crucial to the therapeutic process. And given that roughly 1 billion people suffer from mental health issues globally, and 40 per cent of those come from culturally diverse backgrounds — it's a huge gap."

Further, aside from Albanian therapists based in Albania, Kosovo or North Macedonia, Bliss also works with Albanian therapists who live in the diaspora, places like Germany, Austria, and the UK. 

"The cultural match of fellow migrants is even more relevant for its users, like you understand my journey as an Albanian living in the UK because you're also an Albanian therapist in the UK." 

Bliss is generating revenue and has active users in 10 countries, including the UK, Germany, Italy, the US, Canada, the United Arab Emirates, and Brazil, and will soon have therapists in the US and Canada. 

Expanding to B2B offerings

Now the company is expanding to B2B clients, as Jona admits, "it's essential for us to build a healthy, sustainable business, as B2C takes a bit longer to scale and is more expensive."

Bliss is offering its service as an employee benefit to corporations and startups. It also delivered its first white label MVP to a Finnish company that operates in mental health but lacked a digital platform. 

The company is bootstrapped but has had strong success in the European tech ecosystem. Its a member of Plug and Play, is backed by EU for Innovation through a project grant from its Challenge Fund, and a grant from the Government of Albania. It won first prize at Tirana Slush'D, the largest startup competition in Albania.

The company's advisors include Peter Vesterbacka—co-founder of Angry Birds and Slush,  and entrepreneur & angel investor Kustaa Valtonen, who's also the visionary behind the Helsinki–Tallinn tunnel. Bliss is also registering the business in Finland, where there's high demand for mental health services. 

The Albanian startup ecosystem is becoming increasingly dynamic, especially with the recent opening of a Plug and Play regional office in Tirana. 

Albania as launchpad to scale

Although focusing on the Albanian diaspora, Bliss' goal is to replicate this model to other underserved diaspora communities, such as Vietnamese people living abroad. 

Doda admits, "Many people ask, 'Why Albania?", but beyond the advantage of piloting in an Albanian-speaking market, the country presents real opportunities for innovation and growth.” 

“For me, it was also a chance to give back to my country, which is often unfairly portrayed in the media."