Food decisions often begin with a very simple question: what should I cook today? For the founder of Byondbites, that everyday question became the starting point for building an AI-powered kitchen and health companion designed to make food choices easier, more personal and more relevant to real life.
From pantry scan to personalised recipes
Byondbites allows users to scan ingredients already available in their kitchen and receive recipe suggestions based on what they have, while also considering cultural food preferences, dietary requirements, health goals and lifestyle. At the centre of the platform is Ayra, an AI kitchen companion built to help users move from uncertainty to action — whether preparing a quick family meal, reducing food waste, understanding a dish's nutritional value, or staying consistent with a personal health goal.
Built for Saudi Arabia and the wider GCC
The larger vision behind Byondbites goes beyond recipe recommendations, aiming towards a household food intelligence platform that connects what people have at home with how they eat, how they feel and what they want to achieve with their health. Saudi Arabia and the wider GCC are central to this vision: many global food and health platforms are developed for broad international audiences and may not fully reflect regional dishes, commonly available ingredients, household habits or bilingual requirements — gaps Byondbites is being built to address.
Alongside Byondbites, Sehrish Khandia is also Co-founder and CEO of Allign Marketing KSA, a content-led marketing and experiential agency working with brands through strategy, campaigns, content, activations and customer experiences. Her professional journey brings together more than 18 years of experience in marketing, brand strategy and operations, along with her background as a certified nutritionist — and her experience as a woman, mother and founder has shaped how she looks at everyday problems and the businesses that can be built around solving them.
AI food-tech's localisation gap in the Gulf
Global food and nutrition apps built by US and European teams have historically struggled to localise well for Gulf markets, where dietary patterns, common pantry ingredients, halal considerations and Arabic-English bilingual usage differ substantially from the assumptions baked into most Western food-tech products. Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030 push toward digital services and preventive health has also increased demand for locally relevant health and nutrition tools, creating space for platforms purpose-built around GCC households rather than adapted after the fact from a Western product. Byondbites' focus on scanning existing kitchen ingredients rather than prescribing a fixed meal plan also reflects a broader shift in food-tech away from rigid diet apps toward tools that reduce food waste and decision fatigue — a category that has grown steadily as sustainability and cost-of-living concerns have pushed households to make better use of what they already have rather than buying new ingredients for every recipe.
Founders who pair a certified nutrition background with hands-on marketing and brand-building experience, as Sehrish does across Byondbites and Allign Marketing KSA, are relatively uncommon in food-tech, where technical or culinary founders often lack the go-to-market expertise to scale a consumer app, and marketing-first founders often lack the nutritional credibility to be trusted with health-adjacent recommendations.
Sources and editorial references
This profile is adapted from Sehrish Khandia's featured profile in the September 2026 print edition of Global Cover Story, based on a self-submitted account and photographs. Company details and figures reflect the subject's own account and have not been independently verified.