Name: Dr. Maria Kardakova
Company: iCook
Position: CEO, Co-Founder
Website: https://icook.health
About Dr. Maria Kardakova
iCook is an AI-powered nutrition platform for individuals and healthcare professionals that transforms personalized nutrition through biomarker integration, clinical-grade meal planning, and automated grocery delivery. We help people navigate the 76% of nutrition confusion that leads to 11 million preventable deaths annually by connecting health data to actionable, evidence-based nutrition.
I founded iCook after witnessing the broken food system firsthand during my PhD in Biosciences and Medicine at the University of Surrey. As a registered nutritionist and co-author of AI food recognition systems, I saw how people struggle with decision fatigue, generic advice, and poor adherence to nutrition plans. The gap between clinical nutrition science and everyday food choices was costing lives and overwhelming health systems.
We launched iCook as the first fully-integrated AI kitchen assistant that connects Electronic Health Records, blood and DNA biomarkers, grocery retailers, and 1,000 custom recipes curated by nutritionists and chefs. Our Mary AI assistant provides evidence-based guidance across biomarkers, fridge inventory, calendars, and shopping lists. Today, we serve 65,000 active users across 176 countries with 250,000 downloads, achieving 10.7% conversion rates that are three times the industry average.
We have proven clinical and commercial traction that sets us apart. We have integrated with major retailers including TESCO, Sainsburys, Walmart, Waitrose, and ASDA for seamless grocery delivery. We partner with RANDOX for blood test integration, enabling 360-degree personalization based on real health markers. Our retention metrics show 19.4% day-30 retention, and we maintain an industry-leading 70.6x LTV to CAC ratio with just £0.25 customer acquisition cost. In 2025, we generated £120K net revenue from B2C subscriptions.
Our impact extends beyond consumers. We are launching iCook Pro for clinics, insurers, and healthcare organizations, tapping into a £170B global market of nutrition, fitness, and wellness professionals. In the UK and EU alone, we have identified a £63M serviceable market across 94,000 reachable professionals including 28,000 dietitians and nutritionists, 63,000 private GPs, and 3,400 health clinics. We are currently piloting with NHS, PureGym, and running clinical trials to validate outcomes for GLP-1 users and chronic disease management.
What makes iCook unique is our clinical integration. Unlike competitors such as MyFitnessPal or Noom, we are the only platform built on UK clinical guidelines including the EatWell Guide, NICE, and SACN recommendations. We connect directly to Electronic Health Records and real biomarker data rather than relying on self-reported information. Our scientific rigour is validated through partnerships with the University of Surrey, University of Cambridge, the British Dietetic Association, and NNEdPro Global Centre for Nutrition and Health.
We are raising £1M pre-seed to scale Mary AI 2.0, accelerate growth marketing, and expand clinical pilots with NHS and GLP-1 programmes. Our goal is to reach £11M ARR by 2028, moving from our profitable B2C foundation into B2B2C scale across healthcare systems, reaching 21M downloads and 159K paid subscriptions by 2027. We are building the clinical infrastructure that will finally connect nutrition science to the kitchen.
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