There’s a kind of founder network in the UK that meets after 5pm, usually in the pub, and is attended by people who have nobody waiting for them at home.
It’s a world Maria Kardakova once felt she had no choice but to live in, staying out late to keep pace with her peers, all while worrying about after-school pickups and whether she was spending enough time with her two young children.
For female founders, that expectation is a tax. Around 70% of UK venture capital deals still happen through informal networks like these.
Maria says lockdown gave her the excuse to stop, and she’s glad it did. Because in her newly free evenings, she realised the room didn’t have to be the one with everyone else in it.
With her two children at home and a husband recovering from cancer, she found herself overpaying for a meal-kit box and becoming frustrated by half-cooked recipes nobody actually wanted to eat. Out of that frustration came iCook, the AI nutrition platform she’s since built into a 250,000-user business across 176 countries, integrated with retailers from Tesco to Walmart.
She built it on a set of firm refusals, most of which she still holds. We spoke about what it costs to build outside a system designed for someone else, why she won’t sell supplements, and why she’s waiting for a Series A to say what she thinks.
How a lockdown argument with a meal-kit box became a 250,000-user nutrition platform.
Who can afford to network: 7.30pm events, self-funded pitch trips and the founders who aren’t in the room.
Why every scientific nutrition platform pivoted into supplements and why she won’t.
Childcare is startup policy. In Sweden, leave is genuinely shared, childcare from year two is good, and the state pays the same per child regardless of income.
Nothing sits between retailers and what they promote. Over 70% of food advertising spend goes to confectionery, sugar, salt and sweet snacks; under 2% to fruit and vegetables.
Hold your ground. She was told more than once, in terms she calls mansplaining, that recipes were finished and ChatGPT would replace them. She smiled and nodded, but now thinks she should have pushed back.
Chase. Scientists are trained to let the work speak and wait to be approached. She now chases investors, and prepares a market proposal in hours where she once would have taken a month.
Boldness has a price. She’s holding her opinions until Series A, on the theory that a funded founder with opinions is read differently from an unfunded one.
Children’s rooms beat lactation rooms for a founder doing back-to-back meetings.
A free ticket for a spouse or nanny changes who can attend.
A founder invited to pitch is usually paying their own airfare.
You have a doctorate in biosciences and a decade across food, retail, catering and biotech. Where did iCook start?
The idea came in 2020 when I was stuck at home with my two younger children and my husband, who had recently had cancer.
I had to feed the whole family, and we tried different boxes and within a couple of deliveries we realised we were overpaying by five times for peeled carrots or some garlic cloves. The food then gets stuck in the fridge, and nobody wants to eat it because it’s already half-cooked and prepped. You still end up spending the same amount of time and money on cooking and buying at the regular supermarket.
So I thought: why not generate a balanced menu instead? A simple machine-learning model that takes the family’s allergies, ethnic background, ages and size, builds the menu, works out how much of each ingredient you need and sends it to the shopping list.
What did the next two years look like?
Execution came in 2022, when I found an investor for £50,000. I already had an iOS prototype, which we launched as a paid app; revenue from that paid for the Android version, a designer, and a food photographer — we had our own kitchen for production and I wanted a minimalistic look. We ran ads on Amazon, the App Store and Google Play to work out which markets to expand into, and broke even within a year on £100,000 of revenue, which went back into the AI.
2024 was the groundbreaking year, when a helpful household tool turned into something closer to an agent. I built the infrastructure myself — probably too precisely — but it means I have hands-on knowledge of every ingredient, policy and nutrition recommendation behind it.
My biotech background means I also know GDPR, so I know what we can and can’t share with third parties, and what sits on Google Cloud versus AWS. After that we put money into the AI rather than advertising, brought a few more people on, and we’ve been raising ever since.
What are you building now?
We’re testing a digital avatar version of the AI assistant. It isn’t just a Duolingo for cooking, teaching you nutrition from a young age. It also gives advice if you’ve been diagnosed with something.
The avatar can support you instead of you going to social media for advice, which is why we want to build trust around it. We’re currently testing a video version that will be available on iPad, where you can discuss your nutrition with it, and the same avatar will show you how to cook anything from boiling an egg to making a crème brûlée.
Where does your conviction about home cooking come from?
I used to live in Sweden, and my roots are in Russia. In both, we still really value home-cooked food. It’s the top luxury you can afford, because you’re preserving nutrients, controlling the salt, sugar and fats you add, and it has not been reheated multiple times. It’s still the best way to feed your family.
Teaching kids and teenagers to cook also takes load off mothers. I learned young because my parents weren’t home and I had to feed myself, not because anyone enjoyed cooking with me. Mine are 13 and 15 now, and they cook for themselves and love it. Even travelling, they’d rather find a grocery store. They’ve got picky about fast food and delivery, and I think that fussiness is a good thing. We’re not against the occasional Five Guys.
Where do you think iCook stands apart from the rest of the nutrition space?
The ethical line for me is supplements. No way. The meta-analyses are clear. They don’t improve quality of life or long-term health, and they don’t extend lifespan. They’re a very small fix.
Meanwhile the food market isn’t developing. Waste keeps growing, and so does the energy and CO₂ cost of producing all of it, and people have no tools to do anything about that. The kitchen hasn’t caught up either. The last real upgrade to the home kitchen was the microwave. That was 1967. We've had sixty years of nothing digital between the fridge and the plate. There’s nothing digital that helps someone planning around a child’s allergies, a partner’s allergies, or their own diabetes.
People go to the supermarket with none of that support, and get bombarded by whatever influencers are pushing, three-for-two deals on sweets dressed up as recommendations.
Is that an outlier, or is it how the industry works?
The UK produces one of the best nutrition reports in the world. The Broken Plate clearly shows how much money we spend promoting confectionery, sugar, salt and sweet snacks — over 70% of all food advertising spend — while fruit and vegetables get less than 2%.
No matter what health campaigns we launch, there’s no intermediary between retailers and what they’re promoting to consumers. I’ve raised this with retailers at several conferences, and they tend to say it’s hands off — we’re selling what our consumers want — even though there’s a good deal of research on how marketing shapes behaviour. If the recommended portion size of a snack is 30 grams, but what’s sold is much larger packs, people under financial pressure may go for the bigger packs, which are better value and eat past the recommended portion regardless. As a registered nutritionist and public health expert, I find that hard to follow.
And that’s why I won’t pivot into supplements, because every other platform that took a scientific approach to nutrition has. All of them. My favourite influencers from five years ago are all selling them now, because there’s no money in recipes.
I want to build an ecosystem for people who still cook from real recipes, preserving the authentic ones and making them healthy with a balanced menu.
I also want guidelines for people who outsource the cooking, a nanny picking the kids up from school, so they know what to cook, that it’s balanced, and that the groceries are there.
What makes a founder credible to investors and retailers now?
I worked for a kefir company, Beautiful Dairy then and Beautiful Kefir now, on the R&D side, on bacterial cultures and their health benefits. I assembled a scientific advisory board, chasing down microbiome professors and top nutritionists, because we wanted a more credible slide for pitches to Sainsbury’s and Tesco.
The response was so low. People said, this isn’t for me. Now it’s the opposite. They turn up at pitch events asking to join your advisory board. The funding narrative has shifted to commercial traction plus institutional backing.
You’ve said startup culture — the pub, the late nights — isn’t built for founders with families. What have you seen work better?
My husband works for a large US tech company, and as a manager he isn’t allowed to do gatherings outside working hours. After 5pm or 6pm, everyone goes home.
I think that’s brilliant, and fair. When my kids were younger I was sending them to after-school clubs they hated, then calling my husband to do the pickup, because everyone was going to the pub and I had to go too.
I went to an event yesterday that ran from 7.30pm to 10pm. Most people there were men, or women without children. They’re 100% dedicated, but they don’t have small kids at home, and I barely see female founders who do.
It’s not that they’re less creative or won’t work hard. They have other duties that come first. I feel lucky to have teenagers now, otherwise I’d feel the FOMO constantly.
Last week I spent four days in Madrid at South Summit, where I pitched. The invite came a week before, so I shifted all my plans and paid for the travel and hotel myself. Nobody reimburses founders for that. I paid £500 for the flight and hotel to stand on a stage for eight minutes. The ROI calculus on pitch trips is brutal, and it filters out anyone who can't absorb that cost. And you’re doing that against 30-year-old guys with no families who won’t be expected to have kids for another fifteen years.
How would you redesign these events?
We don’t need female-friendliness. We’re fine with just having the same opportunities.
I’ve seen lactation rooms at major tech summits, which is great, but with the noise and heat I wouldn’t use one twice. A founder has meetings back to back, a pitch to prepare, and still needs to eat. Even on my own I was overwhelmed by the end of the day. Children’s rooms would be amazing. So would a free ticket for a spouse, or a nanny. I love how IKEA takes care of kids so parents can shop normally.
Beyond the events, childcare is the game-changer. In Sweden, parental leave is genuinely shared, and from year two the childcare is good enough that both parents can go back to work. The government pays the same for every child, whatever you earn.
What does doing everything right look like now, and why isn’t it enough?
The calibre of startups now is completely different from two years ago. With AI, we’re all learning faster what we’re expected to show up with. People who weren’t confident with a pitch deck now are, including me.
I prepared my cap table in a day, and that used to take several consultations with advisers. AI as a co-worker is brilliant for market research. If I meet an investor from Brazil, a proposal for that market takes hours, not a month, something solid on what happens if they invest and we advertise there.
It takes a lot of mental resilience. I’ve watched founders get overwhelmed by the sheer number of pitches and emails.
Scientific-minded people don’t like to chase. We want to be chased. That ego doesn’t help, and it doesn’t help with being visible either. I fought it for years, and I’m putting out more public content now, which has brought the ego down, because it forces you to explain things so people understand them.
What would you tell a founder starting where you started?
Hold your ground. Nobody knows better than you do. If you believe in your idea, and you have the competencies to back it up, and you see the potential, don’t let anyone ruin it.
I've been told more than once that recipes are dead and ChatGPT replaces them. Those people have never had to feed a family of four with two different allergies on a Tuesday night.
I smiled and nodded. I don't do that anymore. I should have said: ask your mum. Is she cooking, or ordering delivery and buying meal kits? She’ll tell you she wouldn’t overpay £100 a week when she can do better herself. I once asked my mum why she still peels potatoes with a knife, and she said it’s because her dad did it that way.
Those things are what make us human, and delegating cooking entirely isn’t going to end well. Every founder needs to hold their idea firmly and be vocal about it, more vocal and bolder than I am.
I've learned to pick my moments. I have strong opinions on food advertising, supplement culture, and how the industry treats evidence. I'm more vocal now than I was two years ago, and I'll keep going. I work hard and overdeliver, but I have my own opinions and I’m not quite brave enough to put them out there. Maybe after a Series A. Just not yet.
Why does a Series A make it safe to be bolder?
Funded founders get read as visionary. Unfunded founders with the same opinions get read as difficult. I know that dynamic, and I'm navigating it, but I'm not waiting for permission to build what I believe in.
Is there anything you’ve read or listened to recently that you’d recommend to our readers?
I read Isaacson's Musk biography. Not for the success — for the failures. The scale of what went wrong and how much one person can absorb and still make decisions. That's what I took from it. What fascinated me was the scale of his actual failures, not just potential ones, and how much a person can process. He’s still across the engineering himself, knows the weight of every detail, and makes huge decisions anyway. We spend too much time worrying what people think of us, and as women especially, we worry so much we forget to do the job. I’d rather not spend that capacity on overthinking. So when people ask if I’m a feminist, yes, but I’d rather prove it through actions than volume.
I also love Michelle Obama’s Becoming, two ambitious people with similar but different ideas about what they want from life. That’s very much my husband and me, and our friends call us a power couple. I have strong family values, I love raising children, and I’d love more. Maybe not as many as Elon Musk.
This series is run in partnership with the Jessica Vollman Foundation, a non-profit founded to honour the legacy of the late CEO, founder and advocate for women in entrepreneurship: Jessica Vollman.