The first version of Fitia knew almost nothing. It could suggest a meal, but it had no vast catalogue, no recipes and none of the polished intelligence its users see today. A prompt might amount to rice, chicken and avocado. For Piero Linares, that simplicity was useful. It revealed whether a small piece of software could solve a recurring problem before the founders spent years decorating the answer.
Linares had already learned to admire numbers in a different habitat. After studying industrial engineering at the Universidad de Lima, he joined Grupo Breca, the Peruvian conglomerate, where he worked between business units and shareholders. His days moved through finance, strategy and business development. Toward the end, he was valuing companies and working around mergers and acquisitions, including transactions involving Marriott operations in Peru and an agricultural unit.
Then his oldest collaborator proposed a much smaller calculation. Ulises Olave had known Linares since they were 11 or 12. They had attended school together, then the same university, where Olave studied systems engineering. Could software calculate targets and assemble everyday food choices around a person's preferences? Linares knew the subject; Olave knew how to build. The friendship had already survived adolescence. A startup would be a new, rather more expensive exam.
Two resignations and a very small app
In 2019, both men left secure jobs. Olave built a basic iOS product to test demand. People used it, so Android followed. They launched officially that July. The business was lean enough to endure without much capital, although endurance is an elegant word for what founders experience as uncertainty. For roughly the first year and a half to two years, Linares has said, the company made about $100 a month.
The founders charged from day one. That choice imposed an early honesty: a download could signal curiosity, but a payment required usefulness. Their Instagram account published educational content and gathered the first audience. As users arrived from Chile, Colombia and Mexico, the product had to understand the local shelves, names and routines that American-made databases often missed. Expansion began as a catalogue problem before it became a map.
Charge early enough to learn whether admiration can survive a checkout screen. Then use local detail as a product advantage, not a translation chore.
This was where Linares's old work and new work quietly met. Corporate finance had taught him to look at companies as systems. A consumer app forced him to examine the system at human scale: which feature gets used, which choice creates friction, which missing item sends somebody away. Fitia combined interviews and messages with analytics. The founders kept adjusting the engine while making the surface feel less like mathematics.
“El algoritmo que hemos desarrollado es el corazón de nuestra aplicación.”Piero Linares
The call at 11:30
Linares discovered Y Combinator by reading startup articles and interviews. Fitia applied late to the Summer 2021 batch and still reached an interview. The founders prepared for about ten minutes of rapid questions. Afterward, they waited. The day stretched past the hour when good news was supposed to arrive. At around 11:30 p.m., Linares received a call from the United States. Michael Seibel invited them into the program.
Because the batch ran during the pandemic, the three-month experience was virtual. YC invested $125,000 under its terms at the time, and Fitia went on to raise seed backing from American investors. Capital sped up hiring and product development, but the more durable benefit may have been a new reference group. Linares has spoken about the value of YC's founder community and the way it changed the company's pace.
Industrial engineering at the Universidad de Lima.
Finance, strategy, business development and M&A work at Grupo Breca.
Fitia launches after Linares and Olave leave their jobs.
Fitia joins Y Combinator and raises seed financing.
The company reports more than 10 million users across 150-plus countries.
By 2023, Fitia reported 800,000 monthly active users in Spanish-speaking markets. Mexico, Spain, Chile, Colombia and Argentina had all grown larger than Peru. The company was learning a flattering and inconvenient lesson: a Peruvian product could travel, but each new market made the definition of "local" harder to maintain.
What the finance years left behind
Linares did not arrive at Fitia as a conventional consumer-tech founder. His résumé began with a risk and markets internship at Pacífico Seguros, then moved through finance and strategy roles at Breca before business development and transaction work. The progression matters because it trained him to move between detail and consequence. A model is built cell by cell, but the conclusion must survive a room full of people whose incentives do not fit neatly inside it.
At Fitia, the room changed. Customers do not debate a valuation memo. They tap, hesitate, replace a suggestion or disappear. The feedback is less ceremonious and often more honest. Linares and Olave learned to combine what people said with what the product showed them. A thank-you message could reveal an emotional benefit. Usage data could reveal that the feature being thanked was rarely opened. Building required respect for both signals without pretending they always agreed.
The founders also resisted treating Latin America as a single convenient market. A database that works in Lima can feel strangely foreign in Mexico City or Santiago. Product expansion meant collecting foods and products people could actually find, then verifying and organizing them well enough for the software to be useful. Fitia's early regional advantage was partly this patient clerical work. Software may travel instantly. Context takes the bus.
Commercially, the model stayed legible: a free version opened the door, while premium features funded the company. Growth broadened from Instagram content to a marketing team, paid channels, sharing tools and referral experiments. The pattern is familiar, but the sequence is worth noticing. Fitia established a use case and audience before adding a large acquisition machine. Distribution amplified a product that had already endured quiet years.
A trophy becomes a backlog
Linares and his team had long wanted to visit Apple Park. They also wanted the invitation to be a consequence of the product's growth rather than a piece of startup tourism. In early 2025, it happened. The Fitia team joined app developers from around the world for a three-day Human-Centered Design Workshop in Cupertino. They mapped user journeys, proposed solutions and moved into wireframes and prototypes.
Linares's public reflection on the visit contains a useful tell. He celebrated the density of insights, then described the experience as a "reality check" that showed how much remained to build. Cupertino produced a photograph, certainly, but it also produced a stronger backlog. This is the operator's trick of turning status into chores before status has time to become perfume.
The labels matter. Monthly active users, downloads and total users are different measures, so the chart is a record of reported milestones, not a clean growth curve. Still, the direction is clear. In 2026, Fitia says it is used by more than 10 million people in over 150 countries and has logged more than a billion meals. Y Combinator lists a team of 26. Small teams create romance in profiles and urgent calendars in real life.
The company has kept widening the product: logging by photo, voice and text; personalized weekly planning; recipe imports; groups; and selectable tones for its AI coach. A 2026 case study describes the engineering team's goal of releasing one major feature a month. The tempo is quicker than the $100 months, though the central product belief remains steady. Preferences are essential if a plan is meant to fit into somebody's routine.
Watch the conversationLinares on Fitia's early product, Y Combinator and the road beyond half a million active users.The advantage of being known early
Startups are fond of describing co-founder relationships as marriages, a metaphor that usually arrives without flowers and with too much cap-table paperwork. Linares and Olave have something more specific: memory. Each knew the other before job titles, funding rounds and press interviews. Their skills are complementary, but so are their histories.
That history does not make decisions easy. It makes candor cheaper. Linares has emphasized the importance of team growth and company culture, while Fitia's hiring language asks new employees to create impact from the first day. The company grew beyond its founders, and the pair had to turn an instinctive two-person rhythm into practices that other people could understand.
Now the difficult market is the United States. Fitia has begun applying lessons from Latin America through paid media and creator partnerships while building community features intended to improve return use. The contest is crowded, the acquisition channels are expensive and the app stores are indifferent to origin stories. A product earns its place again each morning.
Linares's career has therefore made an appealing loop. At Breca, he analyzed acquisitions and valued businesses from the outside. At Fitia, value accumulates from countless small decisions made inside: a clearer choice, a better database entry, one less reason to close the app. The spreadsheet never disappeared. It simply moved behind the habit.