UcciIt all started over lunch.
They were probably never meant to meet. Different companies, different jobs, different floors. In a large office complex, everyone lives in their own small world.
12:07 — the canteen
The one room that ignores the org chart
At noon everyone goes down. The tables fill in the order people arrive, not in order of seniority. It is the only place in the building where a finance director can end up wedged between two interns from the third floor.
That lunchtime, two salesmen set their trays down opposite a developer.
What was on the plates
- Chicken curry, overcooked rice
- Grated carrot, factory dressing
- Plain yoghurt, no spoon
None of these dishes inspired Ucci. That may be exactly the point.
Ordinary talk: the companies, the jobs, what everyone is working on. Then one sentence changes everything.
"We're actually looking for someone who can build apps."
The two salesmen had an idea: transform their property business with an application. They had even started once, with a first developer. The project had stopped along the way.
A new team forms around the table. Four of them. Two will stay to the end.
Hicham and Ali.
Month 1 — everything is fine
The best possible start
At first it all looks promising. The ideas are there, the meetings follow one another, the analysis moves fast. Everyone leaves with a list of tasks.
Month 3 — the slowdown
Then things slow down.
Replies come less and less often.
Meetings are pushed back, then pushed back again.
Some information never arrives at all.
Bit by bit, a project meant to move with four people is carried by two. They keep going anyway, because they still believe in it, and because you always tell yourself the next meeting will unblock everything.
Month 7, 21:42 — one message
Seven words on a Tuesday night
The unsettling part is not the quitting. It is that Hicham had the same sentence sitting in drafts for three days, never sent.
They call each other. The conversation was supposed to last ten minutes.
00:51 — three hours later
What if the real project had been there all along?
They start with what went wrong. Then with what they would have liked to build. And finally with something far simpler: the reason they had met in the first place.
A table. A lunch. People who do not know each other, sharing the same space for a few minutes.
On one side
Someone cooks far too much. A dish made for the family. A recipe mastered over decades. A tray of pastries. A meal with three portions left over.
On the other
At that same moment, minutes away, someone is simply looking for something good to eat. And opens a delivery app by default.
In between
Nothing. No way for them to find each other. The problem was obvious, and nobody had solved it at that scale.
The next day — first blank page
What they decided to build
Exactly what they would have wanted themselves: an app to see what people are cooking around you, book a portion, and meet over a dish.
No restaurant needed.
No middleman needed.
No need to make it complicated.
One person cooks. Another wants to eat. Ucci brings them together.
The best food does not always come from a restaurant
Sometimes it is made minutes from your door. A home-made lasagne. A tagine that has been going for hours. Cookies still warm. A family recipe someone has made for twenty years without ever writing it down.
Ucci exists to get all of that out of the kitchen, and find it someone who happened to be looking for exactly that.
But behind the dishes there is something else. People. Habits. Recipes you will not find anywhere else. And encounters that would never have happened.
Because a good meal already brings people together. Ucci only removes what was keeping them apart.
Today
Two people. One app. Several years.
Hicham and Ali built Ucci between the two of them, from the first diagram to the last screen. They imagined the product, developed the apps, built the technology, designed the interfaces, searched for the right words — and started over every time something was not good enough.
No large team. No dozen people behind the project. Two people convinced a simple idea could become something real.
They kept one rule from that first venture. It is the most important one:
Fewer promises, more things actually built.
The team
The nicknames came on their own, during the long evening sessions.
Hicham "Braise" — design, back end, identity. Software engineer and application developer. He was the one at that table on the first day. Called Braise because he works the way he cooks: fierce heat to start, then hours of watching without ever walking away.
Ali "Levain" — product, mobile apps, data. Developer, met on the project that never made it. Called Levain because his message about quitting is what made Ucci rise — and because he never signs off an idea without letting it rest overnight.
One address, and no support desk between you and us: hello@ucci.io
Somewhere, someone is making a dish they love.
Someone else is wondering what to eat tonight. They do not know each other yet. They may be minutes apart. Ucci exists for that meeting — because in the end it did not come from a software project. It came from a lunch.