A San Francisco banker hopes to strike silicon gold in Mid-Missouri when his company launches a new home-cooked food app here this summer.
Rolla native AJ Shrestha recently moved back to Mid-Missouri to launch Kwik Dish, a web app that allows users to order meals from restaurants or home cooks. To do so, the Missouri University of Science and Technology graduate gave up a $200,000-a-year job as an equity research associate at Deutsche Bank's San Francisco office.
Now prepared to launch the app in Jefferson City and Columbia this June, Shrestha and his small team are making final preparations before the launch.
When launched in June, Jefferson City and Columbia will be the first markets for the fledgling app. He grew up in Rolla and earned a bachelor's of electrical and computer engineering and a master's of electrical engineering from Missouri S&T. He later earned another master's in quantitative finance from Georgia Tech.
For about three years, Shrestha worked as a banker for Regions Bank and Raymond James. Eventually he worked his way up to a job as a research associate at Deutsche Bank in San Francisco.
While living in Silicon Valley, though, Shrestha caught the entrepreneurial bug and started work on Kwik Dish, which he calls "Uber for food."
"I just wanted to build something," Shrestha said. "So a group of us came up with this idea."
Kwik Dish initially plans to offer only lunches for pickup from home cooks and local restaurants. Meals will range from $6-$9 each, with higher-priced meals being more exotic fare. Half the cooks on the app will be restaurants, which Shrestha said is designed to drive foot traffic into partner restaurants.
About a dozen Jefferson City restaurants and 10 home cooks have signed up to serve Kwik Dish customers so far.
"We want to give restaurants an opportunity to sell additional items, and you can only do that if people come," Shrestha said.
Because he grew up in the region, he wanted to launch the project in the area. To date, Kwik Dish has raised about $70,000 in funding and has about six other people in the region working on the project. Heading into the launch, Shrestha believes his business will work.
"Having been in the investment space, we should be able to analyze what is a good business and what is not a good business," Shrestha said.
Know of any business happenings around Jefferson City? Let us know at [email protected].