In a world filled with “vibe coding,” Zach Yadegari, teen founder of Cal AI, stands in ironic, old-fashioned contrast.
Ironic because Yadegari and his co-founder, Henry Langmack, are both just 18 years old and recently graduated from high school. Yet their story, so far, is a classic.
Launched in May, Cal AI has generated over 5 million downloads in eight months, Yadegari says. Better still, he tells TechCrunch that the customer retention rate is over 30% and that the app generated over $2 million in revenue last month.
Although TechCrunch couldn’t validate his download and revenue claims, Cal AI does have a 4.8-star rating on the Apple App Store, with 66,000 reviews, and over 1 million downloads on Google Play with a 4.8-star rating on nearly 75,000 reviews.
The concept is simple: Take a picture of the food you are about to consume, and let the app log calories and macros for you.
It’s not a unique idea. For instance, the big dog in calorie counting, MyFitnessPal, has its Meal Scan feature. Then there are apps like SnapCalorie, which was released in 2023 and created by the founder of Google Lens.
Cal AI’s advantage, perhaps, is that it was built wholly in the age of large image models. It uses models from Anthropic and OpenAI and RAG to improve accuracy and is trained on open source food calorie and image databases from sites like GitHub.
“We have found that different models are better with different foods,” Yadegari tells TechCrunch.
Along the way, the founders coded through technical problems like recognizing ingredients from food packages or in jumbled bowls.
The result is an app that the creators say is 90% accurate, which appears to be good enough for many dieters.
Cal AI founding team:
Jake Castillo (bottom right); Blake Anderson (top right); Henry Langmack (top left); Zach Yadegari (bottom left)Image Credits:Cal AI
Teen coders and a hacker house
Yadegari is also earning some fame for his early success. But, unlike teen c …