I launched a healthcare startup with no medical or business background

Zak Marks, 27, is the cofounder and CEO of Kitt Medical, a company that supplies wall-mounted emergency kits for allergic reactions. Business Insider has verified Marks’ allergy diagnoses and Kitt Medical’s financials. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

As a five-year-old, a friend’s mom made us toast as a snack — butter for me and peanut butter for her son — using the same knife.

After eating it, I felt itchy, my throat began to swell, and I broke out in hives.

An allergy test showed that I was allergic to tree nuts and legumes. I was handed two adrenaline pens and told that, if I ever had a really bad reaction, it could develop into anaphylaxis.

I had no idea what any of that meant. However, my allergies would lead me to start my business, Kitt Medical, that brings in $998,000 in annual recurring revenue.

I didn’t use to carry my adrenaline pen with me

I’ve never had to use my adrenaline pen because I’ve never developed the key symptoms of anaphylaxis — when your throat closes up, you can’t breathe, and you get circulation problems.

Before Kitt Medical, I was terrified of using a pen. Until I was a teenager, my mom carried them for me. When I went to university, I was going out alone and didn’t want to carry this bulky pen with me.

In my final year at university, studying product design, we were told to develop something we cared about.

Redesigning the pen without engineering skills wasn’t possible. I started brainstorming, “If I can’t redesign the pen, what can I do that builds around the existing one and plugs the gaps?”

The gaps were that adrenaline pens typically expire within 12 to 18 months, they are inconvenient to carry, and most people aren’t aware of them or trained to use them.

The initial idea, stemming from fire extinguishers and defibrillators, was a wall-mounted kit with a screen and speakers. Through pilots and testing, we whittled it down to a glorified briefcase that can hold pens.

Building with no background in medicine or business

Our goal is to create a new standard for allergy care — a kit like a defibrillator in every school, workplace, restaurant, or stadium. If someone has a reaction, a trained staff member runs to the kit, takes it to that person, gets the adrenaline pen, follows the training, and saves their life.

I wanted to make it a reality, but I didn’t have a background in medicine. I had recently graduated from university, and didn’t know how to run my own business.

My dad and brother-in-law advised me that I needed a cofounder. I was luckily introduced to James Cohen, who was in sales, worked in schools, and had an operational and finance head on him.

James and I worked together to raise about £100,000 from friends and family in 2021. I quit freelancing, he quit his furlough job, and we went for it.

We invested in marketing, conferences, prototype creation, manufacturing resources, and more. We built a website to monitor the kits and support pharmaceutical partners.

Designing the product from scratch

The kit itself isn’t a medical product, so there wasn’t red tape around that. But we knew we wanted to provide an all-in-one service, so we had to get a special license to distribute medicine to sell the kits with adrenaline pens in them.

We had to hire a regulatory affairs consultant to hold that license and were put on a waitlist.

We’ve worked with consultants and doctors in the field who love what we’re doing and want to help us. One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever received was to hire people smarter than you to do the things you can’t.

We piloted the kit in schools. In November 2022, we raised more capital, largely through grants and pitching competitions, as we were keen to hold a majority share in the company.

In 2023, we returned to those schools and replaced their old kits with our new ones. By then, we had functioning software and a license to sell medication. Each year we will send out new adrenaline pens to replace expired ones.

Prior to having the license, we weren’t taking any payment for medication; the pilot schools were getting their medication separately. There was a lot of waiting, a lot of waitlist building, and trying to keep the momentum up with constant marketing.

In 2024, we figured out how to sell to businesses, having already been supplying schools for years.

The legislation can be prohibitive because adrenaline is a prescription-only medicine. However, if you’re a UK business with an occupational health plan, you can purchase spare adrenaline pens. That opened a lot of doors to sell to qualifying businesses.

Our revenue is good and growing organically through referrals, and our path to scaling right now is to keep launching kits in different sectors. But our biggest success is the lives we’ve potentially saved.

Our Kitts have been used to treat 17 life-threatening allergic reactions.

I never set out to be an entrepreneur. I didn’t think I had it in me. Sometimes, the experts are too close to the problem. When you’re an outsider, you’re so sick of it that you’re driven to fix it, and that gives you a fresh perspective. The key is knowing our blind spots and reaching out to others when we need help.

I don’t think of myself as someone running a healthcare startup — just someone trying to solve a problem I am constantly affected by.