In a world full of “Vibe coding”, Zach Yadegari, a teenager founder of Cal Ai, is in an ironic, old -fashioned contrast.
Ironic because Yadegari and his co -founder, HEnn LangukThey are both only 18 years old and recently graduated from high school. However, their story, so far, is a classic.
It started in May, Cal Ai created over 5 million shots in eight months, says Yadegari. Even better, tells TechCrunch that the customer maintenance rate is over 30% and that the application has created over $ 2 million in revenue last month.
Although TechCrunch was unable to ratify reception and revenue claims, Cal AI has a 4.8 -star rating in the Apple App Store, with 66,000 reviews and over 1 million Google Play shooting with 4.8 -star ratings in about 75,000 reviews.
The idea is simple: Take a photo of the food you are going to consume and leave the applications log and macros for you.
It’s not a unique idea. For example, the large dog in calorie count, MyFitnesspal, has the characteristic of the marmalade. Then there are applications such as Snapcalorie, which was released in 2023 and created by the founder of Google lens.
The advantage of Cal Ai, perhaps, is that it was built entirely in the era of large images. It uses models from anthropomorphic and openai and rag to improve accuracy and is trained in calorie databases and open source images from websites such as Github.
“We have found that different models are better with different foods,” says Yadegari TechCrunch.
Along the road, the founders are coded through technical problems, such as identifying the ingredients from food packages or t -shirts.
The result is an application that creators say it is 90% accurate, which seems to be good enough for many diets.
Teen Coders and a Hacker House
Yadegari also wins some reputation for his early success. But, unlike adolescent encoders who grow up with AI Copilots, he dominated Python and C# in high school, he said.
Yadegari created his first business in the ninth grade and was selling it For $ 100,000 in another toy company, Freezenova, when he was 16, he says Techcrunch. “After quarantine, schools gave Chromebook to all their students and it is not surprised. The children tried to abuse this by playing games at school,” he said.
The school responded by blocking internet access to these toy sites. So he “saw an opportunity” to build a website that gave access to all unblocking.
The best place? Call the website “completely science”, so the school will not prevent it.
With this sale, he and Langmack were watching the Combinator videos and socialized with the crowd of the X coder in search of a new idea. He met with Blake Anderson on X, who also became a co -founder of Cal Ai. Anderson, now 24 years old, had won alert as a young consumer applications encoderAlso, for creating Dating Dating Chatgpt tips such as Rizzgpt and UMAX.
Yadegari and Langmack had their idea after Yadegari started beating the gym to gain weight and “impress the girls”, he said, smiling.
Then they made another cliché option: they moved to San Francisco to live in a hacker house while building their original.
But while there, Yadegari, the son of two lawyers, learned a Contraian lesson. He discovered that he wanted to go to college and not become a classic type of Silicon Valley’s abandonment.
“Twenty -four seven grinding, sleeping on the floor, in fact, one of the nights, and it was a very fun time, and taught me a lot,” he said of the experience.
But he looked around. “We were surrounded by people who were in the late 1920s or 30s. And I realized that if I didn’t go to college, that would be life.”
While he has not yet determined which university he will attend, he and Langmack are still having fun running their company. It now includes another co -founder, Jake Castillo, 28 who is COO and running marketing of influence, as well as eight full -time employees between developers, designer and social media managers.
