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

In a world crammed with “vibe coding,” Zach Yadegari, teen founding father of Cal AI, stands in ironic, old style distinction. 

Ironic as a result of Yadegari and his co-founder, Henry Langmack, are each simply 18 years outdated and not too long ago graduated from highschool. But their story, thus far, is a basic.

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 charge 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 critiques, and over 1 million downloads on Google Play with a 4.8-star ranking on practically 75,000 critiques.

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 novel thought. As an illustration, 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 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 means of 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 also 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 college, 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 taking part in video games in class,” he mentioned.

The college responded by blocking net entry to these sport websites. So he “noticed a chance” 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 varsity wouldn’t block it, too. 

With that sale, he and Langmack watched Y Combinator movies and socialized with the coder crowd on X in search of a brand new thought. 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 courting recommendation apps like RizzGPT and Umax. 

Yadegari and Langmack had their thought 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 stay in a hacker home whereas constructing their prototype.

However whereas there, Yadegari, the son of two legal professionals, discovered a contrarian lesson. He found he needed to go to varsity and never turn out to be a basic 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 rather a lot,” he mentioned of the expertise.

However he regarded round. “We had been surrounded by folks that had been of their late 20s or 30s all day. And I noticed 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 working their firm. It now contains one other co-founder, Jake Castillo, 28 who’s COO and working influencer advertising, in addition to eight full-time staff between builders, a designer, and social media managers.