Teenage entrepreneur creates innovative new companies in Cyprus

Arian Adeli started his first company when he was sixteen. The company has been successful, and so Arian has written a book to go with it. Since then, he and his team started a cooking website which allows you to upload a picture of a meal, and then it gives you the recipe.

It is all rather impressive for a 17-year-old, so the Cyprus Mail asked him how he did it.

“My first company Rivo Trading, which was a platform that helped anyone with any level of experience to trade stocks and bonds and to improve their results if they had experience. The software enables automatic trading robots that execute trades according to your specifics. So they would analyse different markets, different instruments automatically. And then automatically make trades.

Rivo Trading also has software that simply notifies you through email with trading signals, advice and tips. It essentially makes it easy for anyone to start investing and trading. That’s the most successful project that I’ve worked on so far,” Arian says.

Another startup that Arian is working on already has over 2,500 users in Cyprus.

“QuikMealz.com is all about food,” Arian explains, adding that the startup was built by an International School of Paphos team with Christopher Luizinho, Tanya Vinogradova, Elli Paphiti, Marco Elverdal, and Suzie Nguyen.

“It’s all about ways to solve problems related to cooking. The website tackles problems such as food waste, time management, health and well-being — You name it, we try to solve it!  You can find the perfect recipe. You can search for recipes, filter recipes by category, by number of calories, by difficulty level, by preparation time, by ingredients, etc. You can find a recipe that perfectly suits your diet, your budget or any other criteria.

And we also offer an additional service, which is a very, very innovative feature. We’re very proud to be the first one in Cyprus to offer it, and it’s probably one of the first in the world. It’s a food recognition system. It uses artificial intelligence technology to analyse photos, and identify a recipe for them. So let’s say you go to a restaurant, you can simply take a picture of your meal, upload it to our website, and we will give you a recipe to make a similar meal at home.

Arian is expanding his work in the culinary industry.

“I’m currently working on providing menus to restaurants, accessible through web or mobile applications. We try to target restaurants that are located at a beach, or in a complex, where people stay for purposes other than eating food. So, let’s say you go to the pool in the complex, and there’s also a restaurant there, you have to walk all the way back to the restaurant. And you have to order there and then go pick up your food again. So we try to eliminate this process by giving them a menu that they can simply scan and look at it on their phone. So they see the menu and they order, the restaurant gets it, the restaurant brings the food to them.

Arian has been involved in many projects as part of the tech teams.

“I’m a tech guy, right? So I try to mix technology with other fields. Cyprus has proven a great place to work in this way,” he adds.

Arian’s family came to Cyprus from Iran about three years ago. Arian went to school here, but did programming projects at the same time.

“Cyprus is small, so it’s a good place for online projects, because building a community here around the site happens fast if the concept is good. But online projects don’t really depend on location: I’ve got servers located all around the world, in the US, the UK, Belgium, and the Netherlands, etc. But Cyprus has been a good place to base one of the companies, and the infrastructure is sufficient.”

Arian Adeli published a book called “The Quantified Fortune” which is intended to teach the basics of modern finance to new investors. On the day of the launch, it managed to achieve the #1 bestseller rank in 33 categories and 4 countries.

What’s next for Arian? “The university is next for me,” he says, possibly in Cyprus or abroad.

“There’s always much to learn,” he says, “but I’m hoping to continue my work as a creative entrepreneur during uni and when uni is over.”