Leksa, a student-tailored dining review app, promotes restaurants based on factors like affordability, convenience and value. The idea began with three UC Irvine students and grew into a platform where the student community shares meal suggestions daily.
Fourth-year computer science students Alvin Phan and Julian Zulfikar met as randomly assigned roommates during their first year at UCI. A few days later, they met fourth-year economics student Danny Nguyen, forming a friendship that eventually evolved into a startup partnership. After years of app development, the trio officially launched the current version of Leksa on Jan. 27, 2025.
“We just keep making up new ideas until we get to some point where we’re like, ‘OK, this looks pretty good.’ And then from that point is when we actually started developing,” Zulfikar told New University. “We spent a majority of our time — maybe up to almost a year — of just not really developing, but just creating the idea in our heads, making sure we’re all on board. And then, once we got that, we went to developing beta.”
Before Leksa became accessible to students, early versions of the platform were tested among the founders and their friends to tweak icons, text and captions. Beta testing is a phase in software development where a select group of users test the software’s features and identify potential issues before the official launch.
The inspiration for Leksa came from a need for a student-focused restaurant rating platform.
“Every single year at the beginning of the quarter or semester, thousands of students across the nation flood their universities’ subreddit pages with the same questions — ‘Where can I eat around here?’ [or] ‘Where can I go out on a date around here?’” Ngyuen told New University. “That really highlighted a huge gap that mainstream platforms weren’t providing for students.”
The app maintains a student-inclusive model that asks users to register with their student email. This approach stems from the founders’ goal for the app to remain applicable to the student experience.
“It keeps our recommendations relevant. We’re not competing on sheer volume of information. We’re just competing on relevant information when it comes to the types of restaurants that we have on our app,” Nguyen said.
Leksa is set apart from traditional food rating apps like Yelp, where over 70% of their user base is over 35 years old as of Dec. 31, 2024.
“There’s a big problem in the sense that when we’re going to a review platform that 75% of our generation doesn’t even contribute to, it makes sense as to why these reviews are so irrelevant,” Nguyen said. “These sites are filled with stock photos and reviews from people who are ages older than us, and it’s hard to get any relevant insight into the things that really matter to us.”
To combat any miscommunication by users, Leksa uses visuals to convey various dining experiences. Users can scroll through feeds specific to their city or school and have the option to browse restaurant photos categorized under “Trending,” “Date Night” or ”Study Spots.” By emphasizing the visual aspect of dining experiences, Leksa offers a less daunting approach to posting public reviews and simplifies the search for recommendations.
Phan, Zulfikar and Nguyen enrolled in the AI Innovation Challenge, hosted by the ANTrepreneur Center, to further develop their idea for Leksa before launching.
“The entrepreneur center in general offers us a lot of resources — to mentors [and] even legal office hours — that helped us in the initial phases of our app,” Phan said. “I think we owe a lot to them, not only just for the course but also the entire center.”
The AI Innovation Challenge asks participants to utilize the power of AI in new ways, offering support and resources throughout the process.
“Our approach was using AI to connect online communities,” Nguyen said. “Algorithms like collaborative filtering kind of recognize what you like, recognize what your friend likes.”
Collaborative filtering analyzes user patterns to make predictions about an individual’s preferences. It also utilizes the interactions among users, assuming that students who liked certain items previously will share similar tastes going forward.
“We really, really needed those 10 weeks to really focus within and lock in and create something from an idea to [an actual] product,” Zulfikar said. “It was a lot of endless nights — me and Danny and Alvin all staying up until 6 a.m. just working.”
The founders are now working on training an AI model to understand the social context behind why people dine out. By maintaining a refined user base and grouping feeds by campus, the app can keep the relevance of recommendations. Their next step is expanding Leksa across all Southern California universities in the upcoming weeks.
For those interested in learning more about the app, visit Leksa’s Instagram page @joinleksa.
Melissa Mixon is a Features Intern for the winter 2025 quarter. She can be reached at mixonm@uci.edu.
Edited by Alyssa Villagonzalo and Xinyu Zhang.