In the tech entrepreneurship circle, there are various "atmosphere coding" and over-hype phenomena, but Cal AI and its 18-year-old founder Zach Yadegari appear different, forming a "old-school" contrast that is both ironic and respectable. Incredibly, both Yadgarry and his co-founder Henry Langmack have just graduated from high school, but their entrepreneurial stories have become classic cases.
According to Yadgarry, Cal AI was launched in May last year and has exceeded 5 million downloads in just eight months. What’s even more exciting is that the user retention rate is as high as more than 30%, and the app’s revenue last month exceeded $2 million. Although TechCrunch has not yet independently verified these data, Cal AI has received an average rating of 4.8 stars on the Apple App Store, with a total of more than 66,000 user reviews; it has also downloaded more than 1 million times in the Google Play Store, and has also received a high score of 4.8 stars in nearly 75,000 reviews.
Cal AI’s core philosophy is simple and practical: users only need to take a photo of food, and the application can automatically analyze and record its calories and macronutrient content. Although this idea is not the first to be founded, with existing veteran applications such as MyFitnessPal already offering similar features and emerging competitors like SnapCalorie created by Google Lens founders, Cal AI’s unique advantage lies in its entirety in the era of large-scale image models. It cleverly utilizes advanced models such as Anthropic, OpenAI, and RAG to improve recognition accuracy and is trained based on open source food calorie and image databases on platforms such as GitHub. “We found that different models perform better when identifying different foods,” Yadgarry stressed.
To achieve high-precision identification, Cal AI’s founding team solved many challenges through its own technical strength, such as accurately identifying information on food packaging and the mixed ingredients in a messy bowl. Ultimately, they claimed that the app's recognition accuracy has reached 90%, which is reliable enough for many consumers who focus on dietary health.
Yadgarry quickly emerged with his early success. Unlike young programmers who grew up with the AI co-pilot, he was proficient in programming languages such as Python and C# as early as middle school. He revealed that he started his first company in the ninth grade and sold it to FreezeNova, a gaming company, for $100,000 at the age of 16. He recalled that after the epidemic ended, the school distributed Chromebooks to students and the students tried to play games on the school's online. The school blocked these game websites, and Yadgarry saw business opportunities in it, built a platform that could access all unblocked game websites, and cleverly named it "Totally Science", successfully avoiding the school's online censorship.
After selling its first company, Yadgarry and Longmarc began researching the videos of Y Combinator and actively communicated with the programmer community on the X platform to find new entrepreneurial inspiration. It was on the X platform that he met Blake Anderson, who later became the co-founder of Cal AI. Anderson, 24, has also attracted much attention for creating ChatGPT-based dating advice apps such as RizzGPT and Umax.
Cal AI’s idea stems from Yadgarry himself starting to work out in the gym, hoping to “impress the girl.” He and Longmark then made another slightly "censored" but pragmatic decision: they moved to San Francisco, lived in a hacker home, and devoted themselves to the development of product prototypes.
Yet, in this entrepreneurial passion, Yadgarry—whose parents were lawyers—had made an unexpected decision. He found himself eager to get a college education rather than being the typical Silicon Valley dropout. “I worked hard 24 hours a day, and even slept on the floor one night, and it was a really fun time, and I learned a lot,” he recalls. "But I looked around and we were surrounded by people in our 20s or 30s all day. I realized that if I didn't go to college, my life might have turned out to be like this."
Even though they have not finally decided which university to attend, Yadgarry and Longmarc are still passionate about running their own company. Currently, Cal AI’s team also includes another co-founder, 28-year-old Chief Operating Officer Jack Castillo (in charge of influencer marketing), and eight full-time employees covering positions such as developer, designer and social media manager. Cal AI's success undoubtedly sets a new example for the younger generation of entrepreneurs, proving that even in the rapidly changing technology field, the "old-school" focus and hard-core technical strength can still create remarkable achievements.