Like millions of fellow 18-year-olds across the U.S., Zach Yadegari spent his summer preparing for college.
Unlike most other freshmen, Yadegari doubts he’ll linger in academia for very long. He’s the co-founder and CEO of Cal AI, a calorie-tracking mobile app he launched from his parents’ home in Roslyn, New York, in May 2024 — and the app’s success to date makes him think he’ll take it full-time well before his class’ graduation date, he says.
Cal AI’s users upload a photo of their food, and the app’s artificial intelligence-based software gives them an estimate of the total calories. The app, which Yadegari says has a 90% accuracy rate, launched in May 2024. It’s free to download in the Apple and Google Play app stores, and a subscription costs $2.49 per month or $29.99 per year.
Cal AI has 30 employees, and brings in roughly $1.4 million in gross profit per month — after the Apple and Google Play app stores take their respective cuts — according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It. That includes nearly $274,000 in monthly net operating income, a measurement of profit before accounting for taxes and interest.
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Yadegari started undergraduate classes at the University of Miami’s business school in August, but doesn’t plan to stay for more than a year, he says. On social media, he touts living a lavish startup CEO lifestyle: He parties “almost every night” in an off-campus mansion he shares “with all my friends,” he said in an Instagram video posted on August 23.
In the video, an advertisement for a mobile app development online course that Yadegari co-launched, he then drives off — purportedly to class — in a Lamborghini with a “CAL AI” license plate. The rest of the video features one man floating in a pool, another doing pushups and a third smoking a cigar while promising that “society lied to you, and money does buy happiness.”
After college, Yadegari dreams of a career in serial entrepreneurship, he says. Technically, he’s already achieved the moniker: As a high school freshman, he built a gaming website called Totally Science that helped students play online games on their schools’ WiFi networks, bypassing internet blocking protocols. He sold the website for roughly $100,000 to gaming company Freeze Nova in February 2024, documents show.
“I think that entrepreneurship is really cool because at the end of the day, age doesn’t really matter much,” says Yadegari. “You’re either good or not good at what you do, and then the market will decide [the] results.”
From coding at age 7 to building a viral app in high school
Inspired by his love of online games like Minecraft, Yadegari’s mother sent him to a summer camp to learn software coding at age 7. From there, Yadegari “started binge-watching YouTube” for tutorials on coding different types of programs, direct messaging other coders and content creators he saw online to ask for tips, he says.
After launching Totally Science, Yadegari tried to create a viral mobile app “because everyone has a phone in their pocket,” he says. His ideas kept flopping, until he focused on a personal problem: He’d started working out “to impress the girls at my school,” and every calorie-tracking app he downloaded made him manually input all his food, which he found tedious, he says.
He talked about it with his friend Henry Langmack, who he’d known since coding camp, and two friends he met on social media platform X — Blake Anderson, 24, and Jake Castillo, 30. The group decided to try building an AI model that could analyze photos of food and “do all of the work for you,” says Yadegari.
Yadegari and Langmack coded the app, and the group spent $2,000 on a social media marketing test run, says Yadegari. The response was positive enough for Yadegari and Anderson, a serial entrepreneur in his own right, to fund Cal AI’s operating and marketing costs for six months until the app stores’ delayed payment schedules caught up.
Cal AI brought in more than $28,000 in revenue for its first month, and then $115,000 for the next month. The co-founders started hiring employees, with Yadegari and Langmack conducting interviews while staying in a San Francisco “hacker house” for the month of July 2024.
Once the summer ended, Yadegari worked 40 hours per week on the app — writing code and brainstorming potential new features with Cal AI’s designers and developers — while managing his schoolwork at Roslyn High School, he says. His parents were supportive of his efforts, and he maintained a 4.0 GPA, he says.
“My parents are really happy with everything with Cal AI, especially my mom. She actually uses the app,” Yadegari says. “Overall, they’re really proud.”
Balancing a CEO job with being a college student
A mobile app may seem like a relatively low-upkeep business idea, but Cal AI’s expenses nearly match its revenue.
The company spends almost $770,000 per month on advertising and marketing alone, for example. Other costs include payroll, software costs, and legal and accounting services. The co-founders do pay themselves some dividends from the app’s proceeds, including one recent $100,000 payment to Yadegari.
The company must also maintain a good reputation in the Apple and Google Play app stores. Cal AI may save users some time compared to its more traditional counterparts, but it’s not magic. Customer reviews show numerous complaints about the app’s accuracy: Users still need to manually input any information the app can’t detect, and correct anything it gets wrong.
Some customers have “misconceptions about Cal AI and what AI can do,” says Yadegari, adding: “Some of our users expect it to have X-ray vision, where if you take a picture of a bowl of food and you hit things at the bottom of the bowl, it’s going to pick it up. It won’t.”
Yadegari hopes to make Cal AI “the biggest calorie-tracking app,” which would likely mean topping industry leader MyFitnessPal’s self-reported 270-plus million users. The startup’s app has 8.3 million downloads as of July, according to a spokesperson, and Cal AI plans to close the gap with more hiring, marketing spend and rollout of new features, Yadegari says.
For the first time, he’s the CEO of a company with adult employees whose families rely on their paychecks — a responsibility he tries to not take for granted, he notes. “I can’t just go away for a few months and neglect things, like I could have with previous projects,” he says.
Yet for all of his long-term goals, Yadegari only plans to run Cal AI for two more years: After that, he’d like to sell it or hand the reins to another CEO so he can start a new company, he says. He’s “not entirely sure” what his next venture will entail, beyond involving AI — but he hopes to “dedicate most of the rest of my life” to it, he adds.
“Ideally, it really shapes the future and is part of my legacy,” says Yadegari.
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