MyFitnessPal has acquired Cal AI, the calorie app built by teenagers

After nearly a year of deal talks, MyFitnessPal has successfully acquired upstart rival Cal AI.

Cal AI is the AI ​​calorie-counting app startup built by two high school teenagers that has soared to over 15 million downloads and over $30 million in annual revenue in less than two years, MyFitnessPal tells TechCrunch.

Cal AI’s team of seven employees, including its co-founder, CEO Zach Yadegari (pictured, above), as well as a small team of contractors, were retained by MyFitnessPal (MFP), according to MyFitnessPal CEO Mike Fisher.

The Cal AI app will remain independent, with the same mission of ease of use: estimating calories by taking photos of food. One upgrade for Cal AI users has already happened since the deal closed in December: The AI ​​app is now integrated into MFP’s massive nutrition database. This database covers 20 million foods, 68,500 brands and meals served in 380+ restaurant chains.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed except that Fisher noted that because the Cal AI team did not have to sell, they were happy with the offer. With that $30 million revenue figure, we can assume that was a good result for the now 19-year-old co-founders, Yadegari, and his high school friend Henry Langmack.

In fact, the deal took considerable persistence, Fisher said. The larger company noticed Cal AI as it started to climb the ranks in the app store, visible through tools like Sensor Tower, he said.

“We’re looking at the entire suite of competitors,” Fisher said, which he said includes about 70 large and small competitors. “They definitely caught our eye, I would say, early last year, and we’ve been talking to them on and off ever since.”

What convinced Fisher and team to pursue the acquisition wasn’t just watching Cal AI’s rise in the app download charts (the two are neck and neck in the top ranking of their category in Sensor Tower) — was also impressed with the focus of the team under its young CEO.

“They’ve gotten a lot of media attention because they’re quite young and it’s easy to dismiss them,” he said, “You have a conversation with them, like I did in late spring last year, and you come away saying this is an impressive young man.”

For example, Cal AI’s regular stand-up meeting takes place on Sunday night. Because the founders are still in school, Yadegari works all weekend on his startup, and his team is dedicated enough to join him on Sundays for a weekly check-in.

“Well, it’s little, little details like that that when you put it together, you say this is someone who doesn’t do this as a hobby,” Fisher said. “They are very serious about it.”

Fisher declined to specify how long the retention period was for the founders and team to remain with MyFitnessPal after the acquisition. Four years is a fairly standard industry term, often tied to payouts, though again, he wouldn’t comment on that even if pressed.

However, we do know that Yadegari is still running the app, now as a unit of MFP, while attending college. The young founder went viral last year as well in X after revealing that of the top 18 colleges he applied to, even with a 4.0 GPA and a successful company, he was rejected by 15.

He told TechCrunch at the time that he had no intention of going to college and instead wanted to focus on his company. But then a summer in a hacker house surrounded by a bunch of classic Silicon Valley college dropouts made him see that his options would forever remain better with a college degree.

Fisher said that MFP currently has no plans to integrate the app into its main product, such as replacing MFP’s current photo meal scanning feature, or moving Cal AI users away. He believes that apps serve different markets.

Cal AI is for those who prefer speed over accuracy. MFP is for those who want the opposite. “We both scan meals, right? So take a picture of your meal, we both do,” Fisher said. But if MFP users take a picture of a hamburger, they can adjust the inputs until they specify three pickles, not two. With Cal AI, “We realized there’s an audience of people who want it fast, want to rely on AI. They want it to not interfere with their lives and not have to think about it too much.”