When Piero Linares and Ulises Olaves left their stable jobs in 2019, they had more conviction than certainty. Linares, an industrial engineer, had spent nearly four years in finance and business development at one of Peru's largest conglomerates; Olaves, a systems engineer, had worked as a product manager building software for financial institutions. These childhood friends decided to bet on an idea that sat squarely in a category neither had professionally explored: nutrition technology.

That bet became Fitia, an AI-powered calorie tracker and meal planning app that has since grown into one of the most downloaded nutrition apps in the Spanish-speaking world—and is now making a push into the US nutrition app market.

The original concept was modest. Olaves proposed building an app that could calculate the calories, nutrients, and food choices a person needed, with an algorithm suggesting what to eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner based on specific goals like building muscle or losing fat. The earliest version was a basic iOS product with no recipe library and no food database, just simple meal recommendations.

Today, Fitia is more sophisticated. Users can log food by photo, voice, text, barcode scan, or manual search, while the app tracks both calories and macro and micronutrients. Around that core sit AI-powered meal planning, personalized recipes, smart grocery lists, Instacart integration, and a 24/7 AI nutrition coach, with adaptive tools that recalibrate as users make progress. Every food entry is reviewed by nutritionists before publication. And because the database spans nearly 2 million verified foods, users can filter it by country.

"We believe food preference is essential for a meal plan to be sustainable," Linares has said of the product's personalization-first philosophy, the element the founders consider the heart of the app.

Word of mouth carried Fitia across borders. After launching in Peru, demand pushed the team to expand into Chile, Colombia, and Mexico. In 2021, Fitia was accepted into the startup accelerator Y Combinator and raised a seed round from US investors, a rare feat for a Latin American startup.

The company now operates across fifteen Spanish-speaking countries, with Mexico, Spain, Chile, Colombia, Argentina, and Peru as its core markets. According to Sensor Tower data provided by the brand, Fitia has consistently ranked ahead of established names like MyFitnessPal, Lose It, Cronometer, and MacroFactor in downloads and top-grossing performance across Spain and key Latin American markets. Fitia today reports more than 10 million users worldwide and a 4.9-star average rating across the App Store and Google Play.

In 2024, Fitia began expanding into the US and other English-speaking markets—a leap the founders have described as a major step up in digital consumption and subscriptions, given how much larger these markets are than Latin America. The company has built momentum through collaborations with influencers and social media advertising campaigns, echoing the Instagram-driven growth strategy that fueled its early rise.

Fitia has also layered in a Reddit-style social community, transforming the calorie tracker into a broader fitness and nutrition hub where users share progress, ask questions, and stay engaged—a feature that deepens retention in a category where consistency is everything.

And the founders have made clear the roadmap is still active, intending to keep refining existing features and adding new ones as user feedback shapes what comes next.

For a meal planning app born far from Silicon Valley, Fitia's next chapter is whether it can repeat the feat in the world's most competitive nutrition app market.

Fitia is currently available on iOS via the App Store and on Android via Google Play.

This article was written in cooperation with Fitia