18-year-old from Long Island creates Cal AI calorie counting app worth millions
Zach Yadegari demonstrates the Cal AI app by taking a snapshot of his lunch.
By Jennifer McLogan
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LONG ISLAND, New York (WCBS) — An 18-year-old high school senior on Long Island is the founder and CEO of Cal AI, an artificial intelligence-based calorie counting app that’s now worth millions.
Zachary Yadegari said all he needed to get his app started was a computer and coding skills.
“Cal AI is an app where you track the calories you are eating just by taking a picture of your food,” Yadegari said.
Cal AI has over five million downloads. He started the building the app at Roslyn High School.
“My whole life, I’ve grown up on all this new technology,” Yadegari said.
Teachers called Cal AI founder a coding prodigy
Teachers say he developed his coding skills as a 7-year-old prodigy. By age 10, he was leading his classmates in coding. At 12, he was winning hackathons against college kids, and published his first app, Speed Soccer. At 14, his website Totally Science launched, and later sold for six figures.
Cal AI, his latest creation, takes a team of 17 employees across four continents and several time zones to run, which keeps his family awake.
“Late at night, he’s actually conducting business. I shrug and go back to bed,” his mother Debi Yadegari said.
Yadegari demonstrated the app by taking a picture of his sushi lunch, which the app calculated at 400 calories and identified the rice, salmon, avocado and spicy mayo involved. The app has a 90% accuracy rate.
The app projects yearly revenue at $30 million.
“I’m still a normal high schooler”
Billionaire tech giants like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs were all college dropouts. Already a millionaire, Yadegari wants to go to college, but colleges don’t seem to want him.
“Despite my 4.0 GPA and 34 ACT, I was rejected from all the top schools I applied to. All of the Ivy Leagues, and then Stanford,” he said.
He thinks colleges put applicants in boxes with no way to value entrepreneurial accomplishments.
His friends say he remains humble.
“I think the most grounding is that I still go to classes and still have to raise my hand to go to the bathroom,” Yadegari said. “I’m still a normal high schooler. I’m going to prom in a couple of months.”
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