A 19-Year-Old Made More Than $100 Million Selling an AI App

MyFitnessPal, the largest calorie-counting service, has acquired the fast-growing Cal AI app, created and launched by two schoolboys. In less than two years, the startup went from a teenage project to a business with more than 15 million downloads and annual revenue of over 30 million dollars.

The main character in this story is 19-year-old Zach Yadegari — a programmer and entrepreneur from Roslyn on Long Island in New York state. He started learning to code at the age of seven and had already published his first apps long before graduating from school. Before Cal AI, he had already sold his gaming project Totally Science for a six-figure sum.

The idea for the new business came from a personal problem. Yadegari was trying to gain weight and regularly counted calories, but existing apps required manually entering every food item and portion. Together with his school friend Henry Langmack, he decided to make the process as simple as possible: just photograph the food, and artificial intelligence would identify the dish, portion size and approximate calorie content.

The service launched in May 2024. The app quickly went viral on social media thanks to its simple interface and active promotion through influencers. Users no longer had to search for products in a database or manually fill out a food diary — it was enough to take a picture of the plate.

The growth was so rapid that one of the market leaders — MyFitnessPal — took notice of the startup. According to the company's CEO Mike Fisher, negotiations lasted almost a year. The management closely watched the competitor's growth and ultimately decided not to fight it, but to buy it.

The deal amount has not been officially disclosed. However, it is known that by the time of the sale Cal AI was generating more than 30 million dollars in annual revenue, and some sources estimate the company's figures even higher. At the same time, the startup was run by a small team of just a few employees.

After the acquisition, the app will not disappear. MyFitnessPal will keep the Cal AI brand and continue developing it as a separate product. Moreover, the service has already gained access to MyFitnessPal's huge database, which includes around 20 million food products, tens of thousands of brands and dishes from hundreds of restaurant chains.

Zach Yadegari himself will remain in charge of the project. He is currently studying at the University of Miami while also developing the business. The young entrepreneur's story has already become one of the most talked-about in the US tech industry: not long ago he was just an ordinary schoolboy with an idea to simplify calorie counting, and today his startup has been bought by one of the largest companies in the digital health market.