Building AlignEat from Dubai
Why a hospitality background and a move to in5 made AlignEat the right thing to build, and Dubai the right place to build it from.
AlignEat exists because the gap was personal first. After years in hospitality, watching guests struggle to navigate menus that had been written for a different audience, the same scene kept repeating: a parent asking the server about peanut traces, a guest quietly skipping the main course, a couple arguing about whether the dish was halal.
The technology to fix this had been ambient for a while. OCR was good enough. Language models were good enough. Knowledge graphs of food and ingredients were starting to exist. The question wasn't whether to build it — it was whether anyone would.
Dubai is the right place to build this. The city has more cuisines per square kilometre than almost anywhere else, the highest concentration of dietary diversity (halal, kosher, vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free), and a community of people who actually live across multiple food cultures every week.
Joining in5 (Dubai's startup hub) and NVIDIA Inception gave us the infrastructure. The 1.26 million dishes in the knowledge graph came from there. The next million will come from a wider net of partners.
We're a small team — Aurélie, Erika, and a handful of advisors — and we like it that way for now. The brief is to build something genuinely useful, charge enough to keep the lights on without selling anyone out, and get out of the way.