In an era dominated by sophisticated ‘vibe coding,’ Zach Yadegari, the teenage founder of Cal AI, presents a refreshingly old-school success story. Yadegari and his co-founder, Henry Langmack, both 18 and still in high school, have built a classic underdog tale. Cal AI, launched in May, has reportedly garnered over 5 million downloads in just eight months, according to Yadegari. He also told TechCrunch that the app boasts a customer retention rate exceeding 30%, with revenues reaching over $2 million last month. While TechCrunch couldn’t independently verify those figures, the app has a 4.8-star rating on the Apple App Store, based on 66,000 reviews, and over 1 million downloads on Google Play, with a 4.8-star rating from nearly 75,000 reviews.
The app’s concept is straightforward: users snap a picture of their meal, and Cal AI automatically logs the calories and macronutrients. This isn’t entirely novel; established players like MyFitnessPal offer similar features, such as its Meal Scan option. Plus, SnapCalorie, founded by the creator of Google Lens, was released in 2023. Cal AI’s potential advantage is that it was built firmly within the age of large image models. It leverages models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) to enhance its accuracy, and it’s trained using data from open-source food calorie and image databases like those found on GitHub. “We have found that different models are better with different foods,” Yadegari shared with TechCrunch.
The founders tackled technical hurdles, like the difficulty of recognizing ingredients in food packaging or within mixed dishes. The result, they say, is an app that is roughly 90% accurate, which seems sufficient for many users.
Cal AI founding team: Jake Castillo (bottom right); Blake Anderson (top right); Henry Langmack (top left); Zach Yadegari (bottom left)
Yadegari is quickly gaining acclaim for his early success. Unlike today’s teen coders, he mastered Python and C# in middle school. At 16, he sold his first business for $100,000 to FreezeNova, another game company. “After quarantine, schools gave out Chromebooks to all of their students, and unsurprisingly, kids tried to abuse this by playing games in school,” he explained. When the school blocked the game websites, he saw an opportunity and built a website providing access to games that weren’t blocked, aptly named “Totally Science.”
Following that first sale, he and Langmack turned to Y Combinator videos and connected with other coders on X, looking for their next idea. On X, he met Blake Anderson, who also eventually became a co-founder of Cal AI. Anderson, now 24, had created some buzz with his ChatGPT dating advice apps like RizzGPT and Umax. The idea for Cal AI came up after Yadegari, motivated by a desire to gain weight and “impress girls,” he stated with a smile, started visiting the gym.
Then came another almost cliché tech startup move: they moved to a San Francisco hacker house to build their prototype. However, Yadegari, the son of two lawyers, took away a contrarian lesson from that experience; he decided he wanted to go to college, not become a classic Silicon Valley dropout. “Twenty-four-seven grinding, sleeping on the floor… one of the nights, and it was a very fun time, and it taught me a lot,” he said. Looking around, he added, “We were surrounded by people that were in their late 20s or 30s all day. And I realized that if I didn’t go to college, this is what life would be like.” While he hasn’t decided which university he will choose, he and Langmack continue to enjoy running their company. It now includes three other co-founders: Jake Castillo, 28, who is COO and leads influencer marketing, in addition to eight full-time employees, including developers, a designer, and social media managers.
Correction: This story was updated to note that the founders are still in high school.
