Two Teenagers Built 'Cal AI', a Photo Calorie App With Over a Million Users

Zach Yadegari, an 18-year-old high school student, is the founder of Cal AI, a calorie-counting app that has gained significant traction since its launch in May. The app has generated over 5 million downloads in eight months, with a customer retention rate of over 30% and revenue of over $2 million last month. Cal AI allows users to take a picture of their food, and the app logs calories and macros for them. Although the concept is not unique, Cal AI's advantage lies in its use of large image models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and RAG, which improve accuracy. The app is trained on open-source food calorie and image databases from sites like GitHub. Yadegari began coding in middle school and built his first business, a website called Totally Science, in ninth grade, which he sold for $100,000 at age 16. After the sale, Yadegari immersed himself in the startup scene, networking and watching Y Combinator videos, where he met co-founder Blake Anderson. Yadegari and his co-founder Henry Langmack developed the Cal AI prototype in a hacker house in San Francisco. The app's creators claim it is 90% accurate, which is good enough for many dieters. The founders have overcome technical challenges, such as recognizing ingredients from food packages or in jumbled bowls, to develop a successful app.