Founders Everywhere: Amal Wakim
Amal Wakim is the founder and CEO of equ, a personalized nutrition platform helping people get healthy without giving up the foods they love - powering consumers and the brands that serve them.
Welcome to Founders Everywhere, where we highlight the incredible people behind the companies we’ve backed at Everywhere Ventures, a global pre-seed fund supported by a community of 500 founders and operators.
Most diets promise results, but they often ask you to give up the foods you love. Before long, the table you share with family and friends becomes a place of restriction instead of connection. equ takes a different approach by using personalized nutrition built around who you actually are, what you actually eat, and where you actually want to go. The platform delivers deeply tailored nutrition plans built by qualified nutritionists. It also provides weekly check-ins and AI-powered guidance so members can lose weight, build healthier habits, and still enjoy the meals that matter to them. With a decade of real-world coaching data behind it and a growing B2B arm powering gym franchises and telehealth platforms, equ is scaling a model that is as focused as it is flexible.
For founder and CEO Amal Wakim, equ is deeply personal. At 16, a borderline diabetes diagnosis forced her to rethink everything she knew about food. After trying many fad diets that didn’t last, she found an approach grounded in balance, education, and portion awareness that helped her lose 30 kilos and keep them off for over a decade. What began as a passion project helping family and friends quickly evolved into something bigger. As demand grew, Amal made the decision to leave her marketing role at Google and dedicate herself full-time to building equ. Amal’s personal transformation didn’t just inspire the product; it shaped the philosophy that nutrition should feel sustainable, not punishing, and that building a healthier relationship with food has the power to improve every aspect of a person’s life.
What’s equ’s North Star?
Our North Star is to change the way the world views nutrition. For me that means helping people build a better relationship with food (seeing it as a friend, not an enemy) whether their primary goal is weight loss, better health, improved sleep, or more energy.
What sets equ apart?
First, we focus on nutrition and nothing else, which is rare. We don’t bolt on workouts or ten other pillars and that focus has let us build a very deep level of personalization. Your plan reflects what you actually eat and enjoy (down to things like a daily vanilla latte) and even if two people get the same recipe, their portions and macros are tailored to their bodies and goals. Second, we have 10 years of real‑world data from 1:1 coaching with dietitians and nutritionists. That conversational and outcomes data now powers our AI, so our recommendations are grounded in what has actually worked.
Tell us about some recent milestones that equ crushed.
One big milestone that we implemented about 3 years ago was shifting from a 1:1 coaching model, where every new member required a new nutritionist, to a scalable, automated, self-serve product supported by AI. That shift unlocked real reach: we could make expert-grade nutrition accessible to far more people, with growth no longer capped by how many nutritionists we could hire, and without sacrificing the accountability that drives results.
The second is moving into B2B and signing our first large franchise partners. Most companies in our space are fighting for the same individual customers in a crowded, expensive market. We took the opposite path: rather than competing for users one at a time, we became the nutrition engine other brands plug into - gyms, franchises, telehealth platforms - white-labeled and powered by equ. They bring an audience that already trusts them; we bring a decade of nutrition data and a depth of personalization they would never build themselves. We’re not competing for those members. We’re reaching them at scale, through partners who have already earned their trust.
What have been some of the biggest challenges founding equ?
For most of our journey, the challenge was simple: cash. We have built a marketing engine that returned $3-5 for every $1 we put in - but bootstrapped, we could only ever spend what was in the bank, while also funding the product and the team. The constraint was never the model; it was fuel. We could see exactly what scale would do and couldn’t reach for it. Today the challenges have changed shape - managing growth as partners come online, and raising our first real capital. We’re about to start our Series A, and even with deep conviction in the numbers, compressing a 10-year journey into a few weeks of investor conversations (and absorbing the inevitable no’s) is emotionally demanding.
How did you choose the name equ?
We originally called the company “equalution,” a mashup of “equilibrium” (a balanced approach to food) and “revolution” (changing dieting and weight loss), but quickly realized no one could pronounce it. During a rebrand we cut the name, the same way we help people trim the unsustainable parts of dieting (and unwanted body fat), and landed on equ. I like that equ is tied to balance in Latin. It still reflects our core idea of balanced, sustainable nutrition, and it was already how most people referred to us.
Fun fact:
I grew up as a serious online gamer back in the dial‑up days, which definitely didn’t help my activity levels. I love games so much that now I avoid them completely because I know how easily I get hooked. I once hit around level 500 on Candy Crush in three days, before I knew I had to delete it.
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