Photo calorie app Cal AI, downloaded over a million times, was built by two teenagers

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Ironic as a result of Yadegari and his co-founder, Henry Langmack, are each simply 18 years outdated and lately graduated from highschool. But their story, thus far, is a traditional.

Launched in Might, Cal AI has generated over 5 million downloads in eight months, Yadegari says. Higher nonetheless, he tells TechCrunch that the client 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 almost 75,000 evaluations.

The idea is easy: 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 massive canine in calorie counting, MyFitnessPal, has its Meal Scan characteristic. Then there are apps like SnapCalorie, which was released in 2023 and created by the founder 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 skilled on open supply meals calorie and picture databases from websites like GitHub.

“We now have discovered that totally different fashions are higher with totally different meals,” Yadegari tells TechCrunch.

Alongside the best way, the founders coded by technical issues like recognizing substances from meals packages or in jumbled bowls. 

The result’s an app that the creators say is 90% correct, which seems to be adequate for a lot of dieters.

Teen coders and a hacker home

Yadegari can be incomes some fame for his early success. However, not like teen coders rising up with AI copilots, he was mastering Python and C# in center faculty, he stated.

Yadegari constructed his first enterprise within the ninth grade and sold 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, children tried to abuse this by taking part in video games at school,” he stated.

The college responded by blocking internet entry to these sport websites. So he “noticed a possibility” to construct an internet site that gave entry to all unblocked video games.

The most effective half? He referred to as the web site “Completely Science” so the varsity 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 notice as a young consumer 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 realize weight and “impress ladies,” he stated, smiling.

Then they made one other cliché alternative: They moved to San Francisco to dwell in a hacker home whereas constructing their prototype.

However whereas there, Yadegari, the son of two attorneys, realized a contrarian lesson. He found he needed to go to school and never grow to be a traditional Silicon Valley dropout sort.

“Twenty-four-seven grinding, sleeping on the ground, truly, one of many nights, and it was a really enjoyable time, and it taught me so much,” he stated of the expertise.

However he appeared round. “We had been surrounded by folks that had been of their late 20s or 30s all day. And I spotted that if I didn’t go to school, that is what life could 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 consists of 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.