The Woman Who Built a Company Because of a Rotting Potato

Happy Weekend! Meet Dalma Szabo, our latest Woman in AI. She built an app that plans your meals and keeps good food out of the bin, because she was tired of wasting it herself. It’s pretty awesome.

-MV

What’s in store:

The woman tackling food waste with AI!
Your Weekly AI Roundup!
Poll of the week: Self driving cars - would you buy?
Which is better for coding - Claude or ChatGPT?

Read Time: 6 minutes

WOMEN IN AI 2026

The Woman Who Built a Company Because of a Rotting Potato

The potato was real. Old, sitting at the back of the pantry, soft in ways a potato should not be.

Dalma, a product manager whose entire career had been built around understanding why people do what they do, threw it out, feeling guilty at the waste. She could not stop thinking about that guilt — about why it never changes anything.

Dalma's company is Oh, a potato! The exclamation mark is part of the name. Radu, her co-founder and life partner, came up with it, and as Dalma tells it: "I think he has a secret naming talent."

Oh, a potato! is an AI app that starts with what is already in your fridge and builds your meals around that, adjusting in real time when your week falls apart, which it always does.

Dalma grew up in Romania and moved to Berlin, where she and Radu had been living with a fridge full of good intentions and an alarming number of forgotten vegetables. She started investigating food waste properly and found that 50-60% of all food waste globally comes from households.

Her household. Yours. Ours.

"Food waste is not an awareness problem. People know that it's bad. It's about the mental load."

And it keeps happening. Not because people don't care, but because caring has almost nothing to do with it. 72% of Europeans say food waste matters to them. The food waste numbers, on the other hand, have barely moved in years.

She ran an experiment. She added CO2 savings to an early version of the app, the environmental proof, the numbers that were supposed to make people act differently.

Users responded with what she calls "absolute indifference." The guilt was not working. It was never going to work.

"Food waste is not an awareness problem," she says. "People know that it's bad. It's about the mental load."

Oh, a potato! starts with the fridge, not the recipe. Traditional meal planning apps start with what you want to cook and build a shopping list from there. This one starts with what's already sitting in your kitchen and builds the week around that. When plans fall apart, the app adjusts in real time.

So if there's a bag of arugula you forgot about, the AI figures out what to do with it before it turns into another thing you throw away guiltily on a Sunday.

Dalma quit her day job in spring of 2025 to go all in. Since then, 40,000 households have signed up, Apple has featured the app, and it ranked No. 1 on Product Hunt.

"The mandate is coming. Most people building in this space haven't clocked what it means yet."

The thing people building in this space have not caught up to: the EU passed Directive 2025/1892, which requires member states to cut household food waste by 30% per person before 2030.

Households account for over half of all food waste in the EU. Dalma found out while preparing a funding submission and checked the numbers three times before she believed them.

"The mandate is coming," she says. "Most people building in this space haven't clocked what it means yet." She clocked it two years ago.

Her ten-year vision is an app that learns a household well enough to predict what they are about to waste before it happens. Adaptive, personalised, running quietly in the background of daily life without requiring anyone to become a more organised person than they currently are.

Which is lucky, she says, because that approach has never worked either.

Try Oh, a potato! at ohapotato.app.

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POLL OF THE WEEK

Would you buy a car that drives itself?

Yes, immediately

I'd wait for the tech to mature

I'd never trust it

I enjoy driving so wouldn't want one

Full results will be at the bottom of tomorrow’s newsletter!

THIS WEEK IN AI

POs shelved, a spy in the boardroom, and Disney buying a bankrupt chatbot

A $30 billion IPO just got scrapped. An OpenAI engineer allegedly hid a recording device behind a TV wrapped in toilet paper. And Character.AI filed for bankruptcy and is now being acquired by the company that previously sued it.

Just a completely normal week.

Here’s what mattered:

Australian AI data centre company Firmus scrapped its $30 billion IPO citing market volatility, opting for private capital instead, in a sign that investor appetite for AI infrastructure without proven returns is cooling fast.
Google debuted Gemini’s enterprise agent at Cloud Next, a unified AI that can plan workflows, connect to internal systems, manage a task inbox and be looped in via email, Slack tag or group chat, with early testers including Shopify, On and PayPal.
Meta’s Superintelligence Lab released Muse Wonder and Muse Wonder Full, its first frontier model attempt to rival OpenAI and Anthropic, with a major focus on long-term active memory and pricing starting at $4 per million input tokens.
Microsoft unveiled Maia 300, its third-generation in-house AI chip set to roll out in 2027, producing 40% more tokens per megawatt than leading GPU systems and delivering seven times the output of its predecessor in a full 96-chip setup.
Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney announced a push toward fully AI-generated game development, with developers reportedly told to stop writing code by hand and use AI to create artwork for its upcoming Disney project featuring Marvel and Star Wars characters.
Character.AI filed for bankruptcy with debts of $50 to $100 million and named Disney as its lead buyer at $20 million, in a remarkable turn given Disney previously sued the platform for using its characters without permission.
Science Corporation implanted its vision-restoring chip PRIMA into its first patient with Stargardt disease in Australia, with the patient able to see a letter in their first rehabilitation session and read a word by their second.
An OpenAI engineer was arrested after allegedly spending weeks using AI chatbots to plan how to hide a recording device behind a TV in an executive meeting room, with investigators still unable to access the encrypted recordings.
Figma announced a wave of AI updates bringing design, coding and website building into one workspace, including GitHub code imports, no-code website building and 20 new integrations with external AI tools.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang publicly disagreed with Sam Altman’s view that some AI-related hacks and scams may be unavoidable, saying better security could have prevented every incident so far, while announcing another $2 billion investment in Europe.