ShareSpoon — Looking for a CTO / Technical Co-Founder (EIT Food TeamUp)

ShareSpoon — Looking for a CTO / Technical Co-Founder (EIT Food TeamUp)

Every day, households throw away perfectly good food — in Poland alone, around 5 million tonnes a year, worth roughly 15 billion PLN — while neighbours a few streets away would gladly take it. This is not a logistics problem. It's a trust, coordination and convenience problem: there is simply no easy, safe way to connect the people who have surplus food with the people who want it.

ShareSpoon is changing that.

We are building a gamified, trust-based circular food-sharing platform — a community marketplace where surplus food gets redistributed instead of wasted. While competitors like Too Good To Go and Olio focus mainly on retail surplus, ShareSpoon targets the underserved household-to-household niche, with trusted local donors (bakeries, cafés, NGOs) anchoring supply from day one, and a gamification and trust layer that makes sharing safe, measurable and fun.

Beyond the B2C core, we see a strong hybrid B2B & B2C opportunity: offering ShareSpoon as a feature/widget embedded directly in the apps of retail and convenience chains (think Żabka, Orlen, Rossmann, Dino, Lewiatan and similar). Based on live data from their supply management systems, near-expiry items could be automatically listed at discounted prices for pick-up at the customer's local store — and the same items could simultaneously be offered in the ShareSpoon app itself. One platform, two revenue engines: community sharing and retail surplus redistribution.

Where we are today:

• First working MVP already built — developed iteratively through AI-assisted development (Base44), validating the concept and core flows

• Concept refined through two full academic cycles (business plan + funding proposal) at Kingston University London, with IP secured

• Small-scale real-life user testing planned for this summer in Człuchów, Poland, on the early MVP

• City-scale pilot planned in the Tricity area (Gdańsk–Sopot–Gdynia) next year

• Grant funding strategy in preparation (PARP/NCBR and EU instruments), with a detailed business plan, financial model and validation roadmap in place

• Stage: pre-incorporation, pre-revenue, pre-seed — the right moment to join as a true co-founder and shape everything from the ground up

Who we are looking for:

A hands-on technical CTO / technical co-founder ready to take full ownership of the product's technical side. In practice, this means:

• Taking over the existing AI-written MVP — auditing, debugging and rebuilding it properly, or rewriting the app from scratch by hand

• Delivering a pilot-ready MVP: a reliable, working mobile app for iOS and Android

• For the operational version: designing an interactive UX/UI, hardening the app for security and performance, and setting up the right backend and hardware infrastructure to scale

Relevant experience could include:

• Mobile app development (iOS/Android)

• Backend development, APIs and databases

• AI and data-driven features

• UX/UI design

• Cloud infrastructure and DevOps

• Marketplace or community platforms (trust mechanisms, user verification, cold-start problems)

You don't need to cover every area alone — what matters most is technical ownership, sound judgment and genuine excitement about early-stage building.

What we offer:

This is an early-stage co-founder opportunity. We are primarily looking for someone interested in equity-based participation, with paid collaboration becoming possible once external funding (grants, pre-seed) is secured. That said, we are open to other forms of cooperation and other candidate profiles — as long as our skills and experience genuinely complement each other.

Immediate goal: we are still looking for a tech partner to build a joint proposal for the EIT Food TeamUp programme — a structured route to test whether we can truly build together, with matchmaking, pitching and co-founder alignment support.

If you want to use technology to cut food waste, improve access to affordable food and build a scalable European food-tech and impact platform from day one — let's connect.