In a world filled with “vibe coding,” Cal AI teen founder Zach Yadegari stands in a sarcasm, old-fashioned contrast.
Ironically, Yadegari and his co-founder Henry Langmack are both only 18 years old and have recently graduated from high school. But their stories are, so far, classics.
Released in May, Cal AI generated over 5 million downloads in eight months, Yadegari said. Better yet, he tells TechCrunch that its customer retention rate is above 30% and the app generated more than $2 million in revenue last month.
TechCrunch was unable to verify his downloads and revenue claims, but Cal AI has a 4.8 star rating on the Apple App Store, 66,000 reviews, over 1 million downloads on Google Play, and 4.8 star rating on nearly 75,000 reviews.
The concept is simple. Take a photo of the food you are trying to burn and record calories and macros in the app.
It’s not a unique idea. For example, Calorie Counting’s Big Dog, MyFitnessspal, has a meal scan feature. Then there are apps like Snapcalorie, which were released in 2023 and created by the founder of Google Lens.
The advantage of Cal AI is that it was probably fully built in the age of large image models. Humanity and Openai and Rag models are used to improve accuracy and are trained with open source food calories and image databases on sites such as GitHub.
“We found that different models are superior in different foods,” Yadegari tells TechCrunch.
Along the way, the founders coded through technical issues, including recognizing ingredients in food packaging and messy bowls.
As a result, the apps that creators say are 90% accurate and seem to be sufficient for many dieters.
Teen Coders and Hacker House
Yadegari has also gained some fame due to his early success. However, unlike the teenage coder who grew up in AI Copilots, he said he had mastered Python and C# in middle school.
Yadegari built his first business in the ninth grade, selling it to another gaming company Frezenova for $100,000 at the age of 16, and tells TechCrunch. “After quarantine, the school provided Chromebooks to all students. Naturally, the kids tried to abuse this by playing games at school,” he said.
The school responded by blocking web access to these gaming sites. There he “sees the opportunity” to build a website that has access to all unblocked games.
The best part? He called the website “completely science,” so the school doesn’t block it either.
At the sale, he and Langmack watched the Y Combinator video and interacted with the Corder crowd at X looking for new ideas. He met Blake Anderson at X. He also became the co-founder of Cal AI. Now 24 years old Anderson had also been receiving notifications as a young consumer app coder to create ChatGPT dating advice apps such as Rizzgpt and UMax.
Yadegari and Langmack had their ideas after Yadegari hit the gym to gain weight and “impress the girls.”
They then chose another cliché. They moved to San Francisco and lived in a hacker’s house while building prototypes.
But while there, Yadegari, the son of two lawyers, learned the opposite lesson. He went to college and discovered that he wouldn’t become a classic Silicon Valley dropout type.
“In fact, it was a 27 shatterings sleeping on the floor, one of one night, and it was a really fun time.
But he looked around. “We were surrounded by people who were present all day in their late 20s or 30s, and I realized that if I didn’t go to college, this was what life was like.”
He has yet to decide which university he will attend, but he and Langmack still enjoy running their company. It currently includes another co-founder Jake Castillo, 28 COOs and running influencer marketing, as well as eight full-time employees between developers, designers and social media managers.
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