Twin brothers Zachary and Elias Dorf thought they’d found the perfect business opportunity. Instead, they spent nearly $500,000 and the better part of a year building an online telehealth business focused on eyelash treatments that didn’t take off. 

Five years later, the technology they built and the lessons they learned became the foundation for Bask Health, a New York-based platform that says it has supported a substantial volume of telehealth transactions and helped businesses reach patients at scale.

Bask Health provides behind-the-scenes tools for companies building telehealth services, including connections with doctors and pharmacies, intake questionnaires, payments, and patient and order management. The company says demand for those tools has grown.

The Dorf brothers were already entrepreneurs before Bask Health. During the pandemic, they built a successful e-commerce business selling masks and in-demand supplies. When it came time to figure out what to do next, they spotted what looked like another promising opportunity in Latisse.

This FDA-approved treatment can help people grow longer, thicker eyelashes. At the time, the brothers saw relatively few other companies selling it online. But there was a big problem, Latisse is a prescription medication. Selling it meant building much more than another e-commerce website. The brothers needed systems for prescriptions, consultations, payments, pharmacy and patient management. They report spending nearly $500,000 putting all of those pieces together. 

The eyelash business didn’t perform as well as they’d hoped. But the systems they’d built turned out to be valuable in a way they hadn’t expected. Soon, other entrepreneurs were approaching the brothers for help launching their own telehealth businesses. 

Initially, Zachary and Elias worked with them as consultants. But after signing three clients, they wondered why they were building the same systems over and over again. That’s when they decided to turn everything they’d learned into a platform that anyone could use, which is how Bask Health was born. 

Today, the brothers describe Bask Health as the “Shopify for telehealth.” Because in the same way Shopify gives entrepreneurs the technology they need to open an online store, Bask Health gives companies the tools they need to launch a telehealth business without spending months and hundreds of thousands of dollars assembling the infrastructure themselves. 

A founder can now come to Bask Health, choose a medication from its marketplace, select the pharmacy and medical infrastructure they need, customize a template and potentially get a telehealth business up and running within a matter of days. 

That marketplace has expanded significantly too. What started with one or two pharmacy partners, one doctor group and one payment processor has grown into a marketplace with a reported more than 60 pharmacies and more than 10 doctor groups to choose from.

As interest in telehealth grew, the ability to help new businesses get started quickly became more relevant. Bask Health had already built its infrastructure around other prescription treatments when demand for GLP-1 weight loss drugs exploded across the US.

All of a sudden both entrepreneurs and established businesses wanted to enter the market but needed the doctors, pharmacies, technology and systems to make it happen. Bask Health was ready.

The company says it has seen growth alongside that demand. Bask Health reports staying at around 10 employees for its first year and a half and today it has roughly 150. Meanwhile, more than 10 million patients have passed through its system and the company had processed more than $1 billion in transactions in March 2026, a figure that has already doubled to  $2 billion.

For Zachary and Elias, building businesses together goes back much further than Bask Health. The twins were born and raised in New York City and as kids were already looking for opportunities, including selling lemonade for $5 to bankers in Tribeca. 

Today, they still work side by side within Bask Health. Zachary primarily focuses on engineering, operations and partnerships, while Elias handles sales and customer success, but there’s plenty of crossover and the pair work closely across all areas of the business.

Bask Health is still headquartered in NYC, off of  Wooster street in SoHo, lower Manhattan. But the brothers are now looking beyond the US with plans to expand into the UK later this year.

That presents a whole new challenge. Every country has its own rules around telehealth, prescribing and pharmacies, meaning Bask Health has to not only learn a new system each time it enters a market, but also weave that system and rules into its software and platform. The brothers say they won’t expand until they’re confident they can make those complexities just as simple for international customers as they have in the US.

Zachary and Elias know exactly how difficult it can be to get a telehealth business off the ground. They report spending nearly $500,000 and many months figuring it out themselves. Five years later, they’ve built a business around making sure other entrepreneurs don’t have to.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not substitute for professional medical advice. If you are seeking medical advice, diagnosis or treatment, please consult a medical professional or healthcare provider.