An undergraduate student who turned to family remedies to solve his personal health struggles is building a platform to bring that knowledge to others.
Mirza Zayan Beg, now in his second year of studying economics and finance at Swansea University, was overweight and found his physical condition was affecting his work while studying for his A-Levels.
“My routine was poor, I had recurring migraines and constant brain fog, and I could not stay consistent in my work,” he tells me for Founder Friday.
“My mother knew several natural remedies and would tell me to drink them, mainly for weight and for bloating. They worked.
“But I never understood why they worked, what was actually in them, or who they were and were not right for.”
These were simple drinks, he says, adding: “The kind that get passed down in a family rather than prescribed by anyone.
“Warm preparations taken for weight and for bloating, made from ordinary ingredients that were already in the house. Nothing exotic, nothing expensive, and nothing I had to go looking for.
“What struck me was not that they were unusual. It was that they clearly did something, and nobody could tell me why. My mother knew what to take and when to take it. She did not know the mechanism, because she had never needed to.
“It had been handed to her the same way she handed it to me, and that is how most of this knowledge travels: accurately enough to work, but with the explanation stripped out along the way.”
Fragmented
When he started looking into it properly, he found something strange: all of the information he sought already existed online.
“It is just scattered, unexplained and hard to trust. There was no single place where an ordinary person could see a remedy, understand how it works, read the evidence behind it and know who it is actually for,” he explains.
“People were not using these remedies, and in most cases did not even know they existed. The questions were everywhere; and the answers were nowhere. That gap is the entire reason PlantRx exists.”
PlantRx begins not with the remedy, he says, but with the unanswered question sitting behind it.
“If something is genuinely affecting your body, you should be able to find out how it works, what the evidence for it is, and whether it is safe for you specifically rather than for people in general,” says Zayan.
There are more than 120 verified plant-based remedies across six areas: sleep, stress and anxiety, digestion and gut health, immunity, energy, and skin and beauty.
Inside the platform, that same remedy described earlier looks very different. “It no longer arrives as an instruction to drink something. It arrives with the ingredients named; the mechanism explained in plain language; an evidence level attached so you know how strong the support for it actually is; safety flags for medication interactions and pregnancy; guidance on how to prepare it properly; and a clear statement of who it is not suitable for.
“A herbalist has checked all of that before it is published.”
AI adoption
Late in 2025 the direction of the whole company changed as AI became widely available.
“I realised that publishing information was no longer enough, because different people can have the same symptom for completely different reasons,” says Zayan. “That is when PlantRx moved from being a content platform to a personalised wellness platform.”
PlantRx functions across four tools.
Remy is the conversational layer, and it is where most people begin: you describe a concern in plain language, the way you would say it out loud, and Remy reasons about it and returns safe, personalised natural remedies rather than a general article about the topic.
The Remedy Library is the discovery and education layer. It is searchable by symptom, by ingredient or by category, and every remedy carries the same structure: what it is, how it works, the mechanism behind it, the evidence level attached to it, who it suits and, just as importantly, who it does not. That last part is usually missing everywhere else, says Zayan.
The Custom Remedy Builder is the formulation layer. Rather than being handed a fixed recipe, you compose a multi ingredient remedy yourself with guidance on preparation, quantities and safety as you go, so the result is yours but it is still checked.
And finally, the Wellness Blueprint is the protocol layer – “the one people underestimate”, according to Zayan. “It generates a phased, multi-week programme aimed at the root cause rather than the symptom, because most natural health advice fails not from being wrong but from being a single tip with no plan behind it.”
Meet Leeds founders building ecosystem for cultural awareness
The aim now is to connect this ecosystem further so the four tools feel like one companion rather than four separate apps – e.g. a conversation with Remy leads naturally into a Blueprint, and the Library and Builder respond to that same context.
Balancing studies with startup
Economics taught Zayan “to think in systems rather than isolated events to see how one decision ripples into the next” while finance “showed me that every decision carries a measurable consequence”.
That combination shaped how he approaches the company, from product architecture through to how he thinks about customer behaviour and building for sustainable growth rather than a quick spike.
“I did not come from a health background, and I did not come from a technical one either. What I had was a problem I had lived through, and a habit of pulling things apart until I understood how they worked,” he expands.
“Everything else I either taught myself or brought in people who were better than me at it. Herbalists verify the remedy science in the background. A developer works with me on security and data protection. Freelancers covered the specialist build work I could not do alone.
“University gave me knowledge, but knowledge becomes far more valuable the moment it is applied. Building PlantRx alongside my degree meant I could learn something in a lecture and apply it to a live business the same week.
“If I had waited until everything felt ready, I would probably never have started at all.”
So how has he balanced all this with continuing his studies?
“At first it felt overwhelming, because both demanded my full attention and neither was willing to wait,” he concedes. “What changed things was realising it was never about finding more hours in the day; it was about building better routines.
“Once I had a structured routine and learned to prioritise properly, both became manageable. University work has fixed deadlines, so it sets the shape of the week. PlantRx gets the consistent daily attention around it. Very little of this company was built in dramatic bursts. It was built in ordinary, repeated hours.
“Time has been the real sacrifice. I removed distractions that no longer aligned with what I was building, not because they were bad, but because they no longer added anything. PlantRx became something I thought about every single day, and that consistency turned into one of my biggest advantages.
“It also taught me the thing I use most now: discipline, and the value of steady progress over chasing perfection. The two things I most refused to waste were my time and my own potential.”