In a world full of “vibe coding,” Zach Yadegari, teen founding father of Cal AI, stands in ironic, old school distinction.
Ironic as a result of Yadegari and his co-founder, Henry Langmack, are each simply 18 years previous and not too long ago graduated from highschool. But their story, to date, is a basic.
Launched in Might, Cal AI has generated over 5 million downloads in eight months, Yadegari says. Higher nonetheless, he tells TechCrunch that the shopper retention price is over 30% and that the app generated over $2 million in income final month.
Though TechCrunch couldn’t validate his obtain and income claims, Cal AI does have a 4.8-star ranking on the Apple App Retailer, with 66,000 evaluations, and over 1 million downloads on Google Play with a 4.8-star ranking on almost 75,000 evaluations.
The idea is straightforward: Take an image of the meals you’re about to eat, and let the app log energy and macros for you.
It’s not a novel thought. As an example, the massive canine in calorie counting, MyFitnessPal, has its Meal Scan function. Then there are apps like SnapCalorie, which was launched in 2023 and created by the founding father of Google Lens.
Cal AI’s benefit, maybe, is that it was constructed wholly within the age of enormous picture fashions. It makes use of fashions from Anthropic and OpenAI and RAG to enhance accuracy and is educated on open supply meals calorie and picture databases from websites like GitHub.
“We have found that different models are better with different foods,” Yadegari tells TechCrunch.
Alongside the way in which, the founders coded via technical issues like recognizing elements from meals packages or in jumbled bowls.
The result’s an app that the creators say is 90% correct, which seems to be adequate for a lot of dieters.
Jake Castillo (backside proper); Blake Anderson (prime proper); Henry Langmack (prime left); Zach Yadegari (backside left)Picture Credit:Cal AI
Teen coders and a hacker home
Yadegari can be incomes some fame for his early success. However, not like teen coders rising up with AI copilots, he was mastering Python and C# in center faculty, he mentioned.
Yadegari constructed his first enterprise within the ninth grade and offered it for $100,000 to a different recreation firm, FreezeNova, when he was 16, he tells TechCrunch. “After quarantine, schools gave out Chromebooks to all of their students, and unsurprisingly, kids tried to abuse this by playing games in school,” he mentioned.
The varsity responded by blocking net entry to these recreation websites. So he “saw an opportunity” to construct an internet site that gave entry to all unblocked video games.
The perfect half? He known as the web site “Totally Science” so the college wouldn’t block it, too.
With that sale, he and Langmack watched Y Combinator movies and socialized with the coder crowd on X on the lookout for a brand new thought. He met Blake Anderson on X, who additionally turned a Cal AI co-founder. Anderson, now 24, had earned discover as a younger client app coder, too, for creating ChatGPT relationship recommendation apps like RizzGPT and Umax.
Yadegari and Langmack had their thought after Yadegari started hitting the health club to realize weight and “impress girls,” he mentioned, smiling.
Then they made one other cliché selection: They moved to San Francisco to reside in a hacker home whereas constructing their prototype.
However whereas there, Yadegari, the son of two attorneys, realized a contrarian lesson. He found he wished to go to school and never develop into a basic Silicon Valley dropout sort.
“Twenty-four-seven grinding, sleeping on the floor, actually, one of the nights, and it was a very fun time, and it taught me a lot,” he mentioned of the expertise.
However he appeared round. “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.”
Whereas he hasn’t but decided which college he’ll attend, he and Langmack are nonetheless having enjoyable operating their firm. It now contains one other co-founder, Jake Castillo, 28 who’s COO and operating influencer advertising and marketing, in addition to eight full-time workers between builders, a designer, and social media managers.
