Before even stepping onto UM’s campus, Zach Yadegari was running a multimillion-dollar startup. His app, Cal AI, has been downloaded more than 10 million times and brings in millions of monthly revenue. And he’s just getting started.
Yadegari was seven years old when he began coding. By high school, he had created his first successful gaming website and sold it for $100,000, so he was no stranger to startups when he co-founded Cal AI.
Cal AI is a calorie counting app that utilizes artificial intelligence to do the hard work of manually inputting information for you. There are two subscription options, where users can pay either $9.99 per month or pay for a year in advance, averaging to $2.49 per month. With a subscription, users can track their weight, measurements and nutrition goals, as well as track water intake and exercise.
Yadegari went viral earlier this year after posting his college rejection results on X. His post reached more than 28 million people — including the mayor of Miami — for being turned down by every Ivy League school despite his competitive resume: a 4.0 GPA, 34 ACT score and a multimillion dollar company.
“At that point, I decided if I’m not going to go to the best place academically for startups, then I’m going to the best school socially — and that’s the University of Miami.”
He created Cal AI after trying out other calorie-counting apps during his freshman year of high school.
“I learned pretty quickly that the best way to actually put on weight isn’t by working out. It’s really in your diet,” Yadegari said. “So, I started to track my calories with one of the most popular apps at the time, but it sucked.”
That’s when he decided to collaborate with a friend, Henry Yangmack, to build something that helps people reach their fitness goals even if they don’t have time to put every ingredient from their meals into a tracking app.
“When all of these new AI tools started releasing, I had the idea to make an app where you could just take a picture of your food and it would do all the work for you,” Yadegari said.
He and Yangmack worked on coding the first version of the app for a month before its launch in May of 2024. Family and friends loved the app even before they created the final version.
They knew Cal AI was going to be more successful than anything they’ve made within days of its launch. After its first month, Cal AI brought in $30,000.
Yadegari said he was cautious of telling everyone he knew about the app’s success, so he kept it a secret. It got harder to hide the $150,000 rolling into his bank account by the second month.
Building off that initial success, Yadegari and Yangmack moved to San Francisco for the summer. They worked tirelessly to keep the app moving by living in their office and hiring their first employees.
“We spent every waking hour of the day in front of our computers, working on this, and just making it great,” Yadegari said. “I think that’s really where the momentum really started to just fly.”
Their work has paid off, literally.
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“We just kept having steady growth, and it lasted until where we are now, doing more than $3 million dollars in a single month,” Yadegari said “It’s kind of surreal.”
Blake Anderson, another co-founder, worked as a mentor to Yadegari when it came to marketing the app. Anderson had success with two other apps, so the team applied his marketing strategy to get Cal AI off the ground.
Their current strategy involves a few hundred fitness influencers who post monthly about the app. Yadegari said that without social media, the app would likely not be as successful as it is.
Cal AI has found its biggest supporters and critics on social media. On social media, Cal AI fights the flood of comments calling the app fake.
Some users say it’s inaccurate because it cannot see “hidden” ingredients, like oil, a calorie dense ingredient.
Yadegari said that the app on its own is more than 90% accurate, but for “hidden” ingredients, the app automatically uses the “standard amount.” Users are able to manually enter ingredients and alter recipes.
Apart from just defending his app, Yadegari has had to defend himself from online misconceptions.
“Some people think I must have had rich parents that helped me through this or that I had investors just give me millions of dollars to scale this, which is not true,” Yadegari said. “All the money that was put into this company was between the co-founders.”
He now lives off campus with more young founders, working on App Mafia, his latest project.
Yadegari describes App Mafia as a creator house, similar to the Hype House or Faze House, where entrepreneurs make educational and short-form content all about app development. He hopes to “cause a movement” by showing how anyone can build their own software company.
As for the future of health and fitness tech, Yadegari believes AI will play an increasingly vital role for Gen Z.
“Traditionally, you’d have to pay for a trainer, but now AI can personalize everything for you,” Yadegari said. “It’s making fitness and becoming healthier easier for everyone.”