Oct. 31, 2025
Zach Yadegari is the 18-year old 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. It has amassed 8.3 million downloads so far and growing.
The company says that it nets $1.4 million per month profit, after expenses, enough for Yadgari to buy a Lamborghini and live the good life. A subscription to the app costs $2.99 per month, or $29.999 per year. It’s free to download in the Apple and Google Play app stores. The app is unique in that it allows you to take a picture of your food and get the number of calories the meal contains, without inputting any data manually, unlike other weight loss apps.
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. Yadegari says that the app has a 90% accuracy rate.
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.
Post college, Yadegari dreams of a career in serial entrepreneurship. 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.
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.
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.
Yadegari hopes to make Cal AI “the biggest calorie-tracking app,” which would likely mean surpassing industry leader MyFitnessPal’s self-reported 270+ 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,