What began as a personal frustration grew into a mission to give immigrant-owned grocery stores the tools they deserve.
During the pandemic, one of us tried to get paan delivered and realized something strange: in a country where you can get anything in two days, the foods that taste like home are still stuck in pen-and-paper economies.
We started asking around. The pattern was everywhere.
A grocer in Carlisle tracking inventory on a notepad. An auntie who couldn't navigate Instacart in English. A vendor who had been serving his community for twenty years but had never appeared in a single online search. These weren't logistics gaps. They were identity gaps.
So we builtSARVA.
SARVA is a voice-first, multilingual platform for ethnic commerce. For vendors, it replaces pen-and-paper with AI inventory, forecasting, and dashboards that work in their language. For shoppers, it brings cultural groceries online through voice ordering that actually understands how our communities search, browse, and buy.
We are starting where we know best: South Asian households and the small grocers who serve them. 6.5 million South Asian Americans. Over 15,000 independent stores. Less than 10% with any digital tools. From there, we are building for the 30 million ethnic shoppers across Asian, MENA, African, and Latin American communities living the same story.
We do. SARVA means “all,” and that's who we are building for.
Milestones
Sarva did not begin as an inventory company. It began as a question about access. Here's how it unfolded.
Sarva’s first public pitch was “Revolutionizing South Asian Delivery” — a question about why South Asian families still struggled to access the groceries and cultural products that felt like home. Selected as finalists at Shippensburg’s Starting Dock and Ship Tank, we learned the problem mattered beyond our team. What started as a delivery idea became a mission to build infrastructure for the small stores already serving our communities.
Our first pilot with Chhapra365 tested Sarva’s earliest delivery version: 75+ products uploaded, 20+ orders in two days, and 50+ early users showing interest. Working directly with the vendor revealed the real bottleneck — messy barcodes, uncertain pricing, and inventory that was hard to digitize. Sarva’s direction shifted from delivery to inventory, product data, and tools built for how these stores actually operate.
Farhan and Dipseka pitched Sarva at the BNY UpPrize Social Innovation Challenge in Pittsburgh. By then, the Chhapra365 pilot had shown that stores needed help with inventory, product data, and digital visibility — not just delivery. This was one of the first moments Pittsburgh felt real for Sarva: a community that understood what we were building and why it mattered for small, immigrant-owned stores.
Dipseka pitched at the BNY UpPrize Final Showcase, where Sarva was named a 2025 Early-Stage Semifinalist among five startups competing for prizes funded by BNY and administered by Innovation Works. Beyond the recognition, Pittsburgh felt open to Sarva — welcoming founders, mentors, and community leaders who cared about the same question: how do we give small, immigrant-owned stores the tools larger retailers already have?
After UpPrize, Pittsburgh was no longer just a pitch destination — it became a city where Sarva could grow. At EXPlore: Pittsburgh Tech Week, we connected with founders, investors, and community leaders who understood that small businesses need more than visibility. They need infrastructure, trust, and tools that fit how they actually work.
Sarva pitched as a finalist at Dickinson’s Innovation Competition Final Showcase — a meaningful moment to bring the company back to campus and share how early testing was becoming a clearer startup vision. The Burgess Institute event reminded us that Sarva’s roots run through the Dickinson community that helped shape our earliest thinking.
Sarva joined Ascender’s Spring 2026 Bootcamp in Pittsburgh — a founder program focused on mentorship, business planning, and pitching. It became one of the first places our Pittsburgh network turned into real relationships. Mentors and operators we met there still shape how we think about product, partnerships, and growth.
Sarva pitched as a finalist at Harrisburg University’s launchU Student Startup Pitch Competition. The experience connected us with Harrisburg’s Center for Innovation & Entrepreneurship and deepened our ties across Pennsylvania’s startup ecosystem.
Sarva was selected for the Spring 2026 gBETA Pennsylvania cohort, a seven-week accelerator powered by gener8tor and Meta focused on mentorship, investor readiness, and pitch opportunities. gBETA pushed us to prove the problem, not just explain it. By the end, Sarva had 9 vendors onboarded and a sharper focus: simple inventory and operations tools for immigrant-owned grocery stores.
Now
We have been building this from the ground up between college classes and jobs. Founders running deliveries ourselves to learn the routes. Vendors texting us feedback we ship the same week. Customers asking when we're coming to their city.
The cultural grocery aisle moved online ten years late. We are the team closing that gap, and we are just getting started.
