Cal AI, an AI Calorie Tracking App Built by Two Teenagers, has Over a Million Downloads

In a world of “vibe coding,” Zach Yadegari, the teen founder of Cal AI, is a surprising throwback to a more traditional approach.

Despite being just 18 and still in high school, Yadegari and his co-founder, Henry Langmack, have built a success story. Since its launch in May, Cal AI has surpassed 5 million downloads in eight months, with a reported 30% customer retention rate and over $2 million in revenue last month, according to Yadegari.

While TechCrunch couldn’t independently verify these claims, the app boasts a 4.8-star rating on both the Apple App Store (66,000 reviews) and Google Play (75,000 reviews, over 1 million downloads).

AI-Powered Meal Tracking

Cal AI’s premise is simple: snap a photo of your meal, and the app logs calories and macros automatically. While similar features exist—like MyFitnessPal’s Meal Scan and SnapCalorie, built by a Google Lens founder—Cal AI stands out by being designed entirely in the era of large image models. It leverages AI from Anthropic and OpenAI, along with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for accuracy, and is trained on open-source food image and calorie datasets from platforms like GitHub.

“We’ve observed that different AI models excel at identifying different types of food,” Yadegari tells TechCrunch.

Throughout development, the founders tackled technical challenges, such as recognizing ingredients from packaged foods or mixed dishes in bowls.

The outcome, according to its creators, is an app with 90% accuracy—apparently sufficient for many users tracking their diet.

Yadegari is gaining recognition for his early success, but unlike many teen coders using AI copilots, he was already mastering Python and C# in middle school.

At 16, he sold his first business—a website offering unblocked games—to game company FreezeNova for $100,000. He built it in ninth grade after noticing that schools were distributing Chromebooks while blocking gaming sites. Seeing an opportunity, he created a workaround and cleverly named the site “Totally Science” to avoid detection.

From Inspiration to Collaboration

Following the sale, he and Langmack immersed themselves in Y Combinator videos and engaged with coder communities on X, searching for their next venture. That’s where Yadegari met Blake Anderson, a fellow entrepreneur known for creating AI-powered dating advice apps like RizzGPT and Umax. Anderson later joined as a co-founder of Cal AI.

The idea for the app came when Yadegari started going to the gym to gain weight—partly, he admitted with a grin, to impress girls. The team then embraced a familiar startup move: relocating to a hacker house in San Francisco to develop their prototype.

Despite the intense experience—sleeping on the floor at times—Yadegari, the son of two lawyers, came away with an unexpected realization. Unlike the typical Silicon Valley dropout, he decided he wanted to go to college. “We were surrounded by people in their late 20s or 30s all day, and I realized that if I didn’t go to college, this would be my life,” he said.

While he hasn’t chosen a university yet, he and Langmack continue running Cal AI, now joined by a third co-founder, Jake Castillo, 28, who serves as COO and oversees influencer marketing. The company has since grown to include eight full-time employees, spanning developers, designers, and social media managers.

Read the original article on: TechCrunch

Read more: OpenAI Introduces New Tools for Businesses to Develop AI Agents