MyFitnessPal acquires Cal AI, the viral calorie app developed by teenagers

After nearly a year of deal negotiations, MyFitnessPal has successfully acquired up-and-coming rival Cal AI.

Cal AI is an AI calorie counting app startup developed by two high school teenagers that has grown to more than 15 million downloads and more than $30 million in annual revenue in less than two years, MyFitnessPal tells TechCrunch.

MyFitnessPal (MFP) has retained the Cal AI team of seven employees, including co-founder CEO Zach Yadegari (pictured above), and a small team of contractors, according to MyFitnessPal CEO Mike Fisher.

The Cal AI app maintains its independence while having the same ease-of-use mission of taking photos of food and estimating calories. Upgrades have already been made for Cal AI users since the deal closed in December. The AI ​​app was integrated with MFP’s huge nutritional database. Its database includes 20 million foods, 68,500 brands, and meals from over 380 restaurant chains.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, except that Fisher said he was happy with the offer because the California AI team did not need to be sold. From the $30 million revenue figure, we can assume that this was a good outcome for the now 19-year-old co-founder Yadegari and his high school friend Henry Langmack.

In fact, Fisher said the deal required a lot of patience. He said the larger company has taken notice of Cal AI as it has started moving up the rankings in app stores, making it visible through tools like Sensor Tower.

“We monitor our entire competitor landscape,” Fisher said, which includes about 70 large and small competitors. “They definitely came to our attention, I think early last year, and we’ve been talking to them off and on since then.”

Fisher and his team were inspired to pursue the acquisition by not only observing Cal AI’s rise in the app download charts (the two companies are tied for the top ranking in the sensor tower category). He was also impressed by the focus of the team, which is running under a young CEO.

“They’ve gotten media attention because they’re quite young, but it’s easy to ignore them,” he said. “When you have a conversation with them, like I did late last spring, they walk away saying this is a great young man.”

For example, Cal AI’s regular stand-up meetings are held on Sunday nights. Since the founders are still in school, Yadegari works on the startup all weekend long, and his team is so dedicated that they join him for a weekly check-in on Sunday.

“So it’s little things like that, but when you put them together, you know this person isn’t doing this for fun,” Fisher said. “They really take it seriously.”

Fisher declined to specify a retention period for the founders and team to remain with MyFitnessPal after the acquisition. Four years is a fairly standard industry term and is often tied to payment, but again, he wouldn’t comment on it even when pressed.

However, we do know that Yadegari is running the app as a division of MFP while attending college. The young founder made headlines last year when he revealed that despite having a 4.0 GPA and a successful company, he applied to 18 top schools but was rejected by 15.

At the time, he told TechCrunch that he had no plans to go to college and wanted to focus on the company. But then a summer in a hacker house among typical Silicon Valley college dropouts made me realize that my options were much better with a college degree.

Fisher said MFP currently has no plans to integrate the app into its flagship product, such as replacing MFP’s current Photomir scan functionality, or to alienate Cal AI users. He believes the app serves a variety of markets.

Cal AI is for people who value speed over accuracy. MFP is for those who want the opposite. “We both do food scans, right? So let’s take pictures of our meals. We both do that,” Fisher said. But if an MFP user wants to take a photo of a hamburger, they can tweak the input until they specify three pickles instead of two. For Cal AI, “We realized that there is an audience that wants AI to be fast. They want AI-based. They want AI to be less intrusive into their lives and without having to think about it too much.”