EST. 2024 · AUSTIN, TXMeet the Founder
Raj is a chemist, not a farmer, and he'll tell you that first. He spent years in metabolomics and lipidomics research before he ever put his name on a bottle of olive oil, and KORAJE still runs on that instinct: don't claim it, measure it. He tastes every incoming sample himself, signs off on every batch before it's bottled, and answers customer questions personally — from a desk in Austin, Texas, thousands of miles from the Jaén estate the oil comes from.
If we make a claim, we prove it.
— Raj, Founder
From the Lab to Jaén
Raj's path into olive oil started at the molecular level, not the dinner table. As a graduate researcher in chemistry, working under Professor Franco Basile on metabolomics and lipidomics, he encountered olive oil as a biochemical system — polyphenols, oleic acid, and hundreds of minor compounds, each one a record of the stress the tree survived to produce it. "Olive oil, which looks simple, turned out to be one of the most complex biochemical systems I had ever studied," he says.
What he also found, studying the category, was a trust problem: widespread mislabeling, weak traceability, and consumers with no real way to verify what they were pouring. He'd spent a decade building the exact analytical skill set to fix that. KORAJE — from coraje, Spanish for courage — is the result.
Two Trips to Spain
Before KORAJE existed as a company, Raj made two research trips to Spain: one to find an oil worth putting his name on, and a second to understand it beyond the lab — sensorially, culturally, on the ground. He trained as an olive oil sommelier, visited dozens of groves, and tasted alongside the farmers who grow the fruit. In Jaén, that search led to the Montabes Vaño family, third-generation growers of a single high-altitude estate in PDO Sierra Mágina — a producer who, in Raj's words, "shared his reverence for the tree."
Why Austin
KORAJE is grown, milled, and bottled in Jaén, Spain, under PDO Sierra Mágina certification — but the company is run out of Austin, Texas, where Raj lives. Every U.S. order ships from here, every customer email gets a personal reply from here, and every new harvest is tasted and approved from here before it goes on sale. It's a small detail, but it means the person deciding whether a batch is good enough to sell is reachable, not a brand voice.
The Name
Koraje comes from the Spanish coraje — courage. Raj has described the olive tree itself as an allegory for it: a plant that doesn't just survive drought, frost, and rocky soil, but converts that stress into its most valuable compounds.
The olive tree does not merely survive hardship. It metabolizes it into something rare.