Tracing two different paths, Mark Niederhaus Esteban and Dharish Totiger found themselves together in a University of New Mexico business course, each pursing a master of business administration degree from the state's flagship university.
Now, a couple of years later, Niederhaus Esteban and Totiger have teamed up to launch an app the pair hope can help simplify peoples' meal planning and grocery buying habits.
Called "MealsGuru," the app, the two co-founders and co-CEOs told New Mexico Inno, would serve as an "all-in-one" grocery shopping and meal planning platform. It'd combine meal plan recommendations based on a person's culinary likes or dislikes with the ability for users to set a personal grocery budget to manage options.
And Niederhaus Esteban and Totiger said the startup, MealsGuru Inc., plans to work directly with grocery stores and retailers to offer real-time price comparisons between stores. Walmart and Kroger, for example, are two of the startup's early target grocery store partners.
The end goal, Niederhaus Esteban said, is "financial empowerment."
"We want to leverage technology to be able to empower people to save money and achieve their financial goals," Totiger added.
The idea for MealsGuru came from a car ride. Specifically, the app inspiration hit Niederhaus Esteban while he and his wife were on a long-distance road trip, talking to one another about various entrepreneurial ventures.
"I identified groceries as a problem," Niederhaus Esteban said. "The surprise of rapid grocery price inflation, food inflation, everything sort of going in disarray toward everybody's pocket."
He said the exact meal planning and grocery budgeting concept flowed from that initial diagnosis.
MealsGuru, which eventually spun out of that road trip ideation, isn't Niederhaus Esteban's first business venture. The first-generation Colombian-American, after serving as a U.S. Navy corpsman and a combat medic under deployment in Iraq, worked as director of operations for a relative's coffee shop in Albuquerque called Villa Myriam, a popular spot in the city's Innovation District.
He then partnered with two other businesspeople to launch Upwell Beverages, a hemp-infused drink distributor based in Albuquerque. That company grew quickly after forming in 2018, Niederhaus Esteban said, distributing beverages across five states within one year.
But the Covid-19 pandemic caused Upwell's business to "dry up," he explained, and the veteran entrepreneur went looking for his next venture.
His earlier business school connection with Totiger, it turned out, provided an ideal opportunity.
Totiger, who was born and raised in India, also has a history of entrepreneurship. His father, he said, ran a firm that manufactured steam turbine blades.
While studying in India, Totiger and a friend started a small business for professionals in the country's festival and market industry. The pair didn't pursue that business for very long, however, and Totiger then left for the U.S. — Albuquerque, specifically.
He enrolled in a master of science program at the University of New Mexico, focused on computer and information systems security. While in that program, Totiger began working at UNM Rainforest Innovations, the university's tech commercialization arm.
That work, he explained, gave him "practical experience" within New Mexico's broader entrepreneurial ecosystem, experience that would continue to grow as Totiger started a finance-focused master of business administration program at the university.
Niederhaus Esteban and Totiger, who shared a UNM business course, first worked together in an entrepreneurial capacity on a program through UNM's Anderson School of Management, called the "Tech Navigator Challenge."
The challenge tasked participants with creating a "commercialization plan" for an existing technology out of Sandia National Laboratories or the Air Force Research Laboratory, according to its website. Niederhaus Esteban and Totiger landed on the same team.
A different UNM commercialization program, called the Lobo Hackathon, provided the pair their first opportunity to test out the idea for MealsGuru.
Called "EatWell Solutions" at the time, Niederhaus Esteban and Totiger entered the Hackathon alongside three other partners in 2023. The Hackathon offered entrepreneurship teams the opportunity to compete for $5,000.
Niederhaus Esteban and Totiger's team was among 10 total to enter the 2023 edition of the Hackathon. Their team ended up being one of five winners selected for the $5,000 prize.
Now over a year since that Hackathon took place, Niederhaus Esteban and Totiger are preparing to take their renamed startup into the big time.
The pair want to launch MealsGuru's flagship application later this year. Its first iteration would come with a set of "core" features, Niderhouse Esteban said, that the startup plans to expand on with future iterations.
The startup has already built out an "alpha" version of the app that it tested with a private group of users earlier this year, and it plans to roll out a "beta" version for more closed-group testing just ahead of the app's public launch in the next several months.
Part of Niederhaus Esteban and Totiger's app development also included conversations with more than 150 people to get a better feel for its potential user base. Those conversations, the two said, have informed the app's early development.
Around a dozen contractors have worked with Niederhaus Esteban and Totiger to build out the alpha, beta and, soon, full public version of the app. Various programs in New Mexico also provided early support, the pair said, including New Mexico State University's FinTech Lab, part of the university's Arrowhead Center, and a pair of initiatives out of Central New Mexico Community College — CNM Ingenuity and ActivateNM.
The startup hasn't received any equity-based financing to date, although Totiger said MealsGuru is "actively seeking" $1 million in the form of a pre-seed investment round — typically the earliest stage of financing for a startup. Those investment dollars would be used to continue iterating on the app and building out additional features, which could include the ability for users to upload their own recipes and one-click grocery ordering, as well as video cooking tutorials.
