Consumer health & wellness · Nutrition tracking

Fitia

A Lima-built AI meal planner and calorie counter that says it has passed 10 million users across the Spanish-speaking world and is now pushing into the United States. No FDA record, no clinical trial and no SEC filing exists for it: this is a consumer app story, not a device story.

Rice, chicken and avocado

The first version of Fitia had no recipe library and no food database. A user entered age, sex and weight, and the app answered with a simple suggestion along the lines of rice, chicken and avocado. That was it. Ulises Olave built the prototype for iOS alone, with no funding, while he and Piero Linares still held day jobs, one at a Peruvian financial conglomerate, one at a telecom.

Today the app logs food by photo, voice, barcode or typed text, tracks calories against more than thirty nutrients, and builds a full week of meals around a person’s stated goal, allergies, budget and the foods they refuse to eat. A shopping list assembles itself from the plan. An AI feature called Fitia Coach answers questions about a logged meal. The company says its food database is verified by nutritionists rather than crowdsourced, and that it now spans several million entries, localized by country so a Mexican user sees “aguacate” and a Peruvian user sees “palta” for the same fruit.

A crowded category with a personalization pitch

Calorie counting is one of the most saturated categories in consumer health software. MyFitnessPal, Lose It, Cronometer and MacroFactor all compete for the same download. Fitia’s pitch is that most of those apps stop at counting: they tell a user what they ate, not what to eat next. Fitia generates the next meal itself, swaps it on request, and rebuilds the week if a user misses a workout or eats out.

That is a product claim, not a clinical one. Fitia is not a medical device. It carries no FDA clearance, is not the subject of any registered clinical trial, and has received no NIH or NSF award on record, the same public sources that document iSono Health, an unrelated device maker, show nothing for Fitia. Its claims of effectiveness rest on app store ratings, download counts and user testimony, not on a study a third party could replay.

Two engineers, one idea, no certainty

Piero Linares and Ulises Olave have known each other since they were eleven or twelve years old. They went through school together, then both enrolled at Universidad de Lima, Linares in industrial engineering, Olave in systems engineering. Linares spent almost four years in finance and business development at Grupo Breca, one of Peru’s largest conglomerates, working on mergers and acquisitions. Olave worked as a database analyst at BBVA, then as a trainee and later product manager at Telefonica, building software sold to financial institutions.

Neither had worked in nutrition. Olave proposed the idea: an algorithm that would calculate the calories, nutrients and food choices a person needed and suggest what to eat for breakfast, lunch and dinner toward a specific goal. In 2019 they quit their jobs. “lanzarme a la piscina sin tener algo seguro fue probablemente la decisión más difícil de mi vida,” Linares told Universidad de Lima in 2023, meaning that jumping in without anything certain was probably the hardest decision of his life. He added that he now considers it the best one.

From Lima to fifteen countries

The app launched in Peru first. Word of mouth, and a following the founders built on Instagram around fitness and nutrition content, pushed demand into Chile, Colombia and Mexico. By 2020, Fitia was a portfolio company of USIL Ventures, the accelerator run by Universidad San Ignacio de Loyola, and was named one of the 100 best startups in the world by the Entrepreneurship World Cup, competing in the event’s Growth category alongside a second Peruvian startup.

The bigger turn came in 2021. Fitia was accepted into Y Combinator’s Summer 2021 batch, a rare outcome for a Latin American consumer startup, and afterward raised what Linares has described only as a seed financing round from US investors, with no amount made public. By August 2023 the company reported more than 800,000 monthly active users and a seventeen-person team including nutritionists, and had landed on Forbes Peru’s list of the country’s most successful startups for a second consecutive year, a list it also appeared on in the magazine’s 2024 edition. Y Combinator’s own company page now lists a team of 26 and Lima as the company’s location; Fitia’s LinkedIn page instead lists San Francisco as headquarters. In 2024 the company began pushing into the US, UK, Canadian and Australian markets, a step the founders have called a much larger jump in digital subscription revenue than growing across Latin America ever was.

What is proven, and what is still claimed

Read plainly: Fitia has real reach, a large user base and a strong app store record, all of it visible on the platforms that host it. What it does not have is anything resembling a public trial, an FDA record or an SEC filing, categories that simply do not apply to most consumer software but that also mean every health-outcome claim here is the company’s own, unaudited by an outside body.

What to watch

• Whether the reported 2021 seed round, or any later raise, ever produces an SEC Form D under Fitia’s name or an affiliate.
• Whether the company reconciles the two different food-database figures it has published in the same year.
• How the 2024 push into the US, UK, Canada and Australia performs against entrenched competitors like MyFitnessPal and Cronometer.
• Recurring user complaints, in App Store and Google Play reviews and in Fitia’s own help center, about free-trial auto-renewal charges and a coin system gating recipe access after a mid-2026 update.

In their words

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Sources

1. YC dataFitia: Automated Meal Planner & Nutrition TrackingY Combinator company page · accessed Sep 25, 2026
2. Public recordSEC EDGAR company search, “fitia”SEC · searched Sep 25, 2026, no results
3. Public recordSEC EDGAR full text search, “Fitia” and “Fitia, Inc.”SEC · searched Sep 25, 2026, no results
4. IndependentIngenieros Ulima traspasan fronteras con aplicacion de nutricionUniversidad de Lima · Aug 21, 2023
5. CompanyFitia: Peruvian AI Calorie Tracker Outranking MyFitnessPal Across LATAM & Spain, Enters the USThe Jerusalem Post, written in cooperation with Fitia · Jun 9, 2026
6. CompanyFitia (YC S21) company pageLinkedIn · accessed Aug 13, 2026
7. Platform dataFitia: Contador de Calorias listingApple App Store · accessed Jan 9, 2025
8. Platform dataFitia: Calorie Counter & Diet listingGoogle Play, updated Sep 23, 2026 · accessed Sep 25, 2026
9. AggregatorFitia Funding profileExtruct AI · accessed Sep 25, 2026
10. IndependentEstas son las 100 mejores startups de Peru en 2024Forbes Peru · Jul 2, 2024
11. IndependentDos startups peruanas se ubican entre las 100 mejores del mundoTechnopatas, Christian Abon · Oct 13, 2020
12. CompanyCobro de suscripcion sin autorizacionFitia help center · modified, accessed Aug 26, 2025
13. IndependentEl impacto de YCombinator, Piero Linares, CEO y cofundador de FitiaShot de Startup, Jose Sanchez · Jul 17, 2024