In a world full of “Vibe coding”, Cal AI’s teenage founder Zach Yadegari forms an ironic, old-fashioned contrast.
Ironically, Yadegari and his co-founder, hEnry Langmackboth are only 18 years old and have recently graduated from high school. So far, their story is a classic.
Cal AI was launched in May and generated more than 5 million downloads in eight months, Yadegari said. Even better, he told TechCrunch that customer retention is over 30%, and that the app had revenues of more than $2 million last month.
Although TechCrunch was unable to verify his download and revenue claims, CAL AI does have a 4.8-star rating on the Apple App Store and has 66,000 reviews, with over 1 million downloads on Google Play, and a 4.8 Star rating for nearly 75,000 reviews.
The concept is simple: take pictures of the food you want to consume and provide you with App log calories and macros.
This is not a unique idea. For example, the big dog in MyFitnessPal’s calorie count has its meal scanning capability. Then there are apps like Snapcalorie Release in 2023 and founded by the founder of Google Lens.
Perhaps the advantage of Cal AI is that it was completely built in the era of large-scale image models. It uses anthropomorphism and models in openai and rags to improve accuracy and is trained in open source food calorie and image databases on sites like GitHub.
“We found that different food models are better,” Yadegari told TechCrunch.
In the process, the founders encode through technical issues, such as identifying ingredients in food packaging or mess bowls.
The result is that the creator says the accuracy of the app is 90%, which seems good enough for many dieters.
Teenager coder and black room
Yadegari also earned some fame for his early success. But unlike the teenager coder who grew up with AI Copilots, he mastered Python and C# in middle school.
Yadegari builds his first business in 9th grade Sold He told TechCrunch that he offered $100,000 to another gaming company, Freezenova, when he was 16. “After the quarantine, the school distributed Chromebooks to all students, and it’s no surprise that the kids tried to abuse this by playing games at school,” he said.
The school’s response was to block access to these gaming sites on the Internet. So he “sees an opportunity” to build a website that can access all unblocked games.
The best part? He called the site “completely scientific” so the school wouldn’t stop it either.
Through this deal, he and Langmack watched the Y combination video and socialized with the coding crowd on X in search of a new idea. He met Blake Anderson on X, who also became Cal AI co-founder. Anderson, 24, Win notice from young consumer application codersalso used to create Chatgpt dating suggestions applications such as Rizzgpt and Umax.
Yadegari and Langmack had their ideas after Yadegari started to go to the gym to weigh and “impress the girls”.
Then they made another cliché choice: they moved to San Francisco to live in the black room while building the prototype.
But there, Yadegari, the son of two lawyers, learned a counter-trend course. He found himself wanting to go to college, rather than being the classic Silicon Valley dropout type.
He said of the experience: “In fact, it was a very interesting time to sleep on the floor and it taught me a lot.”
But he looked around. “We are surrounded by people in our 20s or 30s all day. I realized that if I don’t go to college, it’s life.”
Although he hasn’t determined which university he will attend, he and Langmack are still happy to run the company. Now, it includes another co-founder, Jake Castillo, 28, who is chief operating officer and influential marketing, as well as eight full-time employees among developers, designers and social media managers.
