It started with a recipe box nobody could read.

Maren Halvorsen’s grandmother wrote her cardamom braid on a three by five card in about 1962, in pencil, in a mix of Norwegian and English, with a note in the margin that the family has argued about for decades. The card lives in a plastic sleeve on Maren’s fridge now. Every December someone photographs it and texts it to the cousins, and every December somebody asks what the word after “cardamom” is.

Maren spent years leading consumer product at a photo-book company in the Twin Cities. Families uploaded thousands of recipe cards there, as pictures. The pictures were kept. The recipes were not: nobody could search them, cook from them on a phone, or read them once the ink went. She left to build the thing she kept wishing existed.

Rohan Mehta’s dadi never wrote anything down. When he asked for her dal, she called him and talked him through it while she cooked, in Hindi and English, over forty voice memos across two years. They lived on one old phone. When that phone started to fail, Rohan, a staff engineer who had spent his career on document understanding and speech systems, wrote a weekend script to transcribe every memo before it was too late.

The script turned into a prototype. The prototype kept her words exactly, “beta, not like that” included, and set the dal out as a recipe he could actually follow. Maren and Rohan met through a friend who had heard about both projects in the same week.