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 just lately graduated from highschool. But their story, up to now, is a basic.
Launched in Could, 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 practically 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 singular concept. For example, the large 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’ve got discovered that completely different fashions are higher with completely different meals,” Yadegari tells TechCrunch.
Alongside the best way, the founders coded by 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 ok for a lot of dieters.
Jake Castillo (backside proper); Blake Anderson (high proper); Henry Langmack (high 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, in contrast to 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 bought it for $100,000 to a different sport firm, FreezeNova, when he was 16, he tells TechCrunch. “After quarantine, colleges gave out Chromebooks to all of their college students, and unsurprisingly, youngsters tried to abuse this by enjoying video games at school,” he mentioned.
The varsity responded by blocking net entry to these sport websites. So he “noticed a possibility” to construct a web site that gave entry to all unblocked video games.
The very best half? He referred to as the web site “Completely 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 searching for a brand new concept. He met Blake Anderson on X, who additionally grew to become 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 concept after Yadegari started hitting the gymnasium to achieve weight and “impress women,” he mentioned, smiling.
Then they made one other cliché selection: They moved to San Francisco to dwell in a hacker home whereas constructing their prototype.
However whereas there, Yadegari, the son of two attorneys, discovered a contrarian lesson. He found he wished to go to varsity and never turn out to be a basic Silicon Valley dropout kind.
“Twenty-four-seven grinding, sleeping on the ground, truly, one of many nights, and it was a really enjoyable time, and it taught me loads,” he mentioned of the expertise.
However he regarded round. “We have been surrounded by those that have been of their late 20s or 30s all day. And I spotted that if I didn’t go to varsity, that is what life can 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 staff between builders, a designer, and social media managers.
