The Dubai-Based Foodtech Focusing on the Meals Other Apps Ignore

In this edition of NextGen, the StartupScene series highlighting rising entrepreneurs across the region, we speak to funch, a Dubai-based lunch subscription service turning one of the most overlooked daily habits into a scalable business.

The business in question targets a small but universal pain point: the average working professional makes dozens of small decisions before noon, and what to eat for lunch rarely feels like the most important one - until it starts draining time, money, and mental energy on a daily basis.

In this quiet frustration, Ahmad Joehnny and Ghada Zanaty saw an opportunity.

"Delivery apps are designed for variety and discovery," says Joehnny, who co-founded funch in 2025 alongside Zanaty. "They are not built for the 80% of meals that are routine and recurring. There is no infrastructure for the daily lunch."

funch offers a subscription service for fresh, chef-made lunch orders that can be placed up to fifteen days in advance and delivered to your home or office each day. With a rotating menu offering a range of global cuisines, funch subscribers have access to plenty of range and variety.

This kind of model offers subscribers a service that is both reliable and dynamic. "We saw firsthand that delivery apps optimised everything for spontaneous, one-off orders," Joehnny tells StartupScene. "Nobody was building for that. The daily lunch is not a marketplace problem. It is a subscription infrastructure problem."

At funch, that infrastructure is powered by AI. Demand prediction, delivery routing, and core operations are all handled algorithmically, which the company says allows it to run at a fraction of the cost a traditional food business would require. It also allows the team to remain small in size but efficient in practice. With a team of only eight people, since launching, funch has delivered over 70,000 meals with a 99.8% delivery accuracy rate and is growing at 25% month-on-month - numbers that helped the startup secure $500,000 in pre-seed funding, in November, 2025.

The target customer, according to Joehnny, is the busy professional or expat who eats lunch from the office every day and is "tired of overpaying, overthinking, and defaulting to junk." Consistency and reliability, rather than endless choice, are the product's core value proposition.

With the Dubai model’s success, the company is focused on expansion. funch is preparing to launch in two additional cities, and the challenge, according to Joehnny, is not about finding demand but instead, "replicating our kitchen-to-doorstep infrastructure in new cities with different regulations, food cultures, and logistics. It is a sequencing and speed problem, not a demand problem."

Their five-year vision follows the same plan for expansion. To Joehnny, this means a future where funch becomes "the default lunch infrastructure in every major city where people work," with millions of meals delivered monthly across the Gulf, Europe, and Asia - all run by AI agents. "We have proven that an AI-native company can build a category from scratch," he says. With funch, this model is applied to quietly reshape one of the working day’s most persistent routines.