He Built an AI App in High School, Made $40M, and Sold to MyFitnessPal—Now He’s Aiming Even Bigger

The 19-year-old founder of Cal AI just landed the kind of deal entrepreneurs wait a lifetime for.

BY BEN SHERRY, STAFF REPORTER @BENLUCASSHERRY

Cal AI founder Zach Yadegari. Illustration: Inc; Photo: Getty Images, Cal AI

Zach Yadegari, 19-year-old University of Miami freshman and founder of AI-powered calorie tracking app Cal AI, has sold his startup to nutrition app market leader MyFitnessPal. Yadegari tells Inc. that his company earned $40 million over the past 12 months, employs around 30 people, and is on track to earn $50 million through 2026. 

Now, the young millionaire says he’ll likely be dropping out of school to build his next company, after previously saying that he didn’t want to be an “archetypal dropout founder.”

This is actually Yadegari’s second exit. The first was Totally Science, an “unblocked” website that allows kids to play online computer games at school—escaping typical internet filters—which he sold at 16. 

After that sale, Yadegari and his friends were brainstorming use cases for OpenAI’s Images API, which enables developers to create apps that utilize OpenAI models that can understand and generate visual data. “I had struggled with calorie tracking in my past,” he says. “I wanted to build a better calorie tracking app, something that’s at least better for my life.” For Yadegari, this meant a faster solution that would not require manual data entry.

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His idea was an app that can track calories just by processing photos of the food you eat. He and his co-founder built the app whenever they could, even during their high school classes. Once Yadegari got Cal AI “to a point where it was accurate enough that it was effective,” he began sharing and promoting it. 

Yadegari says that Cal AI’s growth can be largely attributed to paid acquisition, rather than word of mouth. Cal AI ran campaigns with nutrition and fitness influencers, and invested heavily in performance ads on Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram. Pouring more money into marketing had had a direct effect on sales growth, he says, and as the company’s revenue has grown, so has its marketing budget. 

Just before leaving for college last year, Yadegari reached out to a few nutrition-tracking companies to gauge potential interest in acquiring Cal AI. He says he was open to “moving on from the project so that I could have more of a typical college experience.” There wasn’t acquisition interest at the time, but a few months later, MyFitnessPal came back ready to make a deal. 

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