A Lawyer Who Left the Law for a Juice Cart
Ashwin Cheriyan grew up in Skokie, Illinois, the child of physicians who had immigrated from India in search of a better life. Around the dinner table, his parents talked shop -- not gossip, but patient stories. People who ate their way into chronic illness, who arrived too late for easy fixes. That specific texture of parental conversation would eventually find its way into a $20 million venture-backed food company. But first, there were nearly a decade of detours.
Brown University for economics. Then the University of Texas School of Law, honors. Then New York, and a seat at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett -- one of the white-shoe firms where M&A associates spend their late twenties reviewing documents at 2 a.m., occasionally surfacing long enough to realize they've helped close $100 billion in transactions. Ashwin was good at it. He stayed four years. Then he stopped.
Around age 30, he moved to San Francisco. He co-founded a short-lived social enterprise called WeGoFair that rated hotels and restaurants on environmental and social performance. It didn't stick. What did stick was a different kind of conviction: that the way Americans eat is both a public health emergency and a planetary one, and that the solution isn't shame or willpower -- it's making the right food irresistibly convenient and genuinely delicious.
In the winter of 2013, he and Shiri Avnery -- his partner in both senses -- set up a cold-pressed juice pop-up in Bernal Heights, San Francisco. No fancy launch event. No press. Just a pop-up, a product, and a problem worth solving.
We know our food must be undeniably delicious to serve as a long-term choice for customers. We aim to show that healthy food doesn't have to be bland.
-- Ashwin Cheriyan, Thistle Series A announcement, 2020That pop-up became Thistle. What started as on-demand juice delivery in the Mission, Castro, and Noe Valley -- launched May 2014 -- evolved into a full subscription meal delivery service: breakfast, lunch, and dinner, plant-forward, ready to eat, rotating weekly, gluten-free and dairy-free by default, with 40+ superfoods and 50+ varieties of fruits and vegetables. Designed by registered dietitians, built to improve gut microbiome health in as little as two weeks.
The founding team included co-founder and chairman Alap Shah, and Shiri Avnery joined Ashwin as co-founder and president. Shiri, who holds a PhD focused on air pollution and agriculture's climate impact, brought a scientific rigor to the mission that matched Ashwin's operational instincts -- the kind of pairing that makes for both a strong business and a very specific kind of dinner conversation.
Ten Years of Not Compromising
The meal delivery space is a graveyard of well-intentioned companies. Blue Apron. Plated. Sprig. The economics are brutal -- fresh food, cold chains, last-mile delivery, customer churn. Thistle survived what most didn't, and Ashwin is direct about why: they never traded product quality for margin.
The bootstrapped years were lean. Seed funding of $1.7M arrived in October 2015. For years, the company grew without major institutional backing. Then in January 2020, PowerPlant Ventures -- the firm that also backed Beyond Meat, Thrive Market, and Ripple Foods -- led a $5.65M Series A. A vote of confidence from people who understand plant-based economics better than anyone. A $10.3M Series B followed in January 2021, again led by PowerPlant, alongside Siddhi Capital, Alumni Ventures Group, and the venture arm of Rich Products Corporation.
By the time the Series B closed, Thistle had 500 employees and was delivering 5.5 million meals. The expansion continued: in December 2022, the company launched East Coast operations with a production hub in Burlington, New Jersey, adding New York City, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Boston, Chicago, Atlanta, and Raleigh to its delivery map. The footprint now spans most of the West Coast and a significant stretch of the East.
The January 2024 Rebrand
Ten years in, Thistle unveiled a new visual identity designed by Pearlfisher, the brand design agency behind some of the most recognized packaging in the food industry. The new logo -- a blooming thistle plant in earthy tones with secondary colors named Beet, Cantaloupe, Celery, and Kale -- marked the delivery of the company's 20 millionth meal. The celebration happened in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with chef Tom Colicchio in attendance. A long way from a Bernal Heights juice stand.
The reason that we still exist...is because we never compromised on product quality.
-- Ashwin Cheriyan, FoodNavigator-USA, February 2024Thistle was named to the Newsweek 2025 Excellence Index 1000 and the San Francisco Business Times Top 100 Fastest Growing Private Companies. Around one-third of its customers arrive through word of mouth -- a metric that says something specific about a food company. You can buy media impressions. You can't buy a friend who actually likes the food enough to recommend it.
Recovering Corporate Lawyer, Mediocre Surfer
Ashwin describes himself as a "recovering corporate lawyer" -- a phrase that works as both credential and punchline. He also calls himself a "mediocre surfer," which anyone who has tried to catch waves in Pacifica, California's cold and choppy ocean will respect as honest self-assessment. He mountain bikes. He explores what the Bay Area eats. These are not incidental details -- they're the habits of someone who takes seriously the idea that life outside the spreadsheet matters.
His parents came to the United States from India, part of the generation of South Asian immigrants whose children grew up watching them build something from a long way from home. Ashwin arrived in Illinois at age 7. The combination of immigrant drive and proximity to medicine shaped a worldview that eventually made leaving a lucrative law career feel less like a risk than a correction.
Born in India, raised in Skokie, Illinois from age 7. His physician parents' patient stories planted the seed for a food company twenty years later.
Left Simpson Thacher & Bartlett -- where he'd worked on $100B+ in M&A transactions -- around age 30. No safety net. Just a co-founder, a city, and a problem.
Co-founded Thistle with his wife Shiri Avnery, a PhD environmental scientist. They run the company together -- she as President, he as CEO. The mission is personal on multiple levels.
Before Thistle, there was Ivy Prep, a SAT tutoring company Ashwin founded -- evidence that he's always been an entrepreneur in temperament, even when circumstances had him in a law firm. WeGoFair, his social enterprise between law and Thistle, pointed toward his emerging obsession with systems-level thinking about business and sustainability. Thistle is where that thinking landed with both feet.
He's also an active angel investor, including a co-founder and investor role at Dave's Hot Chicken Franchise Co. -- which is either a curious contradiction for a plant-forward food CEO or a very sensible portfolio diversification, depending on how you read it.
Money and financial success aren't the ultimate drivers of happiness...it's the meaningful stories we've lived and the positive impact we've had that bring fulfillment.
We'll never sacrifice taste, convenience, or quality.
The time spent building Thistle has been the most deeply satisfying in our career. We wouldn't trade it for anything.
What's notable about Ashwin's public commentary is its specificity. He doesn't speak in mission-statement generalities. His argument for Thistle isn't about wellness trends -- it's about the structural reality that people eat badly not because they want to, but because good food is hard to access and easy food is bad. Fix the access problem. Make the product irresistible. Let behavior follow. It's the logic of a lawyer who learned to think about incentive structures, applied to kale bowls.