About Zipli - the story behind the surplus food platform

Our story

Zipli is a female-led impact startup from Helsinki, Finland, on a mission to make sure good food doesn’t end up in the bin. In her early twenties, Ninja – our founder and CEO – financed her business studies by working as a temp-help waitress in big restaurants and at catering events. There were plenty of reasons why food ended up as waste, but every time she had to empty perfectly good meals into the bin, it pained her not to be able to do anything about it.

That image never left her because sustainability and circularity – using the planet’s finite resources smartly – have been close to her heart for as long as she can remember. Zipli started as an idea of Ninja’s; Hasan joined soon after, and the two of them have been building it together ever since.

In the autumn of 2023, Ninja decided to stop postponing the idea of becoming what she called a “circular entrepreneur” and moved to Lisbon to find out what that could look like. She joined the PUSH impact incubator at Casa do Impacto, with Hasan on the team as developer, and over the following months the idea evolved rapidly. Working under the name OnoGrow, the team focused initially on solving the gap in supply and demand of surplus food in Southern Europe.

Soon after, the team applied to SoTecIn Factory, an EU Horizon-backed accelerator and got in. That’s when they were able to focus fully on turning the idea into a real product.

“I was truly surprised when I got the SoTecIn Factory acceptance email and thought it was spam at first. I had to read it several times before it sank in: we’d been given the chance to build our solution with real funding, alongside inspiring, mission-led teams from all over Europe. Without the program, I would probably have waited for ‘the right time and place’ forever!” – Ninja Fedy

Ninja and Hasan in Portugal during the SoTecIn Factory demo days.

In parallel, a connection formed in Finland: the Food Waste Ecosystem project – involving the City of Helsinki, City of Vantaa, National Resources Institute Luke and Laurea University of Applied Sciences – was piloting food donation to community kitchens but was held back by a lack of digital tools. That gap is what Zipli was built to close.

Ninja moved back to Helsinki, and NoWaste Futures Oy – the company behind Zipli – was registered in December 2024.

Since then, one MVP has grown into several products, developed with the help of software engineers, designers and a handful of trusted advisors. Backed by funding from the City of Helsinki, our commercial pilots have gone on to validate the solution with Stadin Safka – the city’s food redistribution hub – as well as with Sodexo Finland and Soupster Family on the donor side, and community kitchens Tsänssi and Ankkuri on the recipient side. In August 2026, Stadin Safka signed as our first large-scale redistribution customer, proving that the tool actually works where it matters most: on the floor of real professional kitchens and in the hub’s day-to-day coordination work. It’s a collaboration we’re proud to keep building on!

Mission & vision

What we’re building toward

Mission

To ensure that perfectly good food reaches people, not landfills, by making surplus food management effortless, data-rich and commercially viable for businesses.

Vision

By 2030, Zipli is the digital backbone connecting food surplus creators with redistribution systems across Europe, making large-scale food waste prevention the default, not the exception.

Being based in Europe has also meant real backing from the Finnish startup ecosystem and public sector – from European Union’s Horizon funding to national Economic Development Center funding and further to hands-on pilots with the City of Helsinki. That support has helped us build faster than we could have alone. Thank you to everyone who believed in us!

Meet the founders

Ninja Fedy & Hasan Shahriar

Ninja Fedy, Founder & CEO

Ninja leads strategy, vision, sales and fundraising at Zipli. She holds a degree in International Business and Economics from Uppsala University and a Master’s in Service Design and Innovation from Laurea University of Applied Sciences, and is currently completing a Master’s in Sustainable Circular Economy at Turku University of Applied Sciences. Before Zipli, she worked across project management, digital marketing and service design including roles at Zalando and Viacom/Nickelodeon in Berlin, and as Lead Service Designer at YIT and Futurice, working with public and private sector clients across the globe.

“Wasted food, wasted time, wasted potential – none of it sits right with me. Zipli is what happens when you’re finally more frustrated than afraid to do something about it.”

Ninja Fedy

Hasan Shahriar, Co-founder & CTO

Hasan leads Zipli’s technology: the AI-powered image recognition that categorizes food in under 30 seconds, the iOS and Android apps, the Zipli Cities dashboard for municipalities, and the infrastructure behind all of it.

He holds a BSc in Computer Science from American International University-Bangladesh and an MSc in Information Processing Science from the University of Oulu. Before Zipli, he founded and ran a mobile app studio in Dhaka, interned at Nordea and The Founder Institute, worked on Open Banking consulting at TietoEVRY in Oslo, and founded Makeshift, a Webflow and AI agency serving clients across seven countries, including KONE.

Hasan Shahriar, Co-founder and CTO of Zipli

“If logging surplus food takes longer than throwing it away, no one’s going to do it. It’s been great to see users get visibly delighted by how easy it is to log their surplus.”

Hasan Shahriar

Team

Built with a wide circle of people

Zipli has been built with the help of a wide circle of designers, developers and advisors over the years, some who’ve stayed close to the project for years, others who’ve contributed for a season or a single sprint. A few names worth calling out.

Marek

UI/UX design. Marek has been part of the team almost since the very beginning.

Tareq & Imtiaz

Backend developers, working alongside Hasan to build and maintain the platform.

Tove Zilliacus

Commercial sales advisor, with 25+ years of B2B sales leadership.

Many other specialists have contributed along the way too. We’re looking forward to working with you in the future, too.

What we stand for

“What you don’t measure, you can’t manage.” Real data is core to how we think about solving food waste.

We treat everyone as a possible donor and a possible recipient. Roles stay flexible, not fixed.

We listen to and back each other. A team this small only works if everyone’s got each other’s back – deadlines included.

Logging surplus never takes more than 30 seconds and just a few clicks. We never make the process more complicated than it actually needs to be.

Donations to community kitchens are always prioritized, even where a surplus sale is possible.

We take the mission seriously, not ourselves. Building a startup is hard enough without forgetting to laugh along the way.

We’d rather try the new way than the old way. Food waste has been logged on paper and spreadsheets for decades – we think that’s exactly the problem.

We say yes before we’re sure we’re ready. Every pilot, every pitch, every hard client conversation started with us being a little braver than we felt.

ABOUT US