By Marcela Bonet
Ever wondered how many calories are on your plate? Cal AI, a smart fitness app, gives you instant answers. Simply take a picture of the food, and the app will provide you with an accurate calorie and nutritional breakdown to help you make smarter dietary choices.
Cal Ai is the brainchild of Zach Yadegari. The 18-year-old teenager came up with the idea in 2023 after struggling with traditional calorie-counting apps.
“I was tracking calories on MyFitnessPal,” he explains. “After three days, I quit. I was finding so much trouble using their app, typing in everything— it was very tedious, very burdensome to do.”
Determined to find a better way, Yadegari teamed up with some high school friends to build a simpler, more accurate tool. They focused on precise calorie counting and nutrition breakdown. The young coders trained Cal AI using images from three different AI models. This enabled it to recognize ingredients in packaged foods and complex meals like mixed bowls. The final challenge was estimating portion sizes. This was solved by comparing user photos to standard portions.
The founders assert that Cal AI is 90% accurate in identifying foods and estimating calories. Its accuracy improves continuously with user feedback. Since its May 2024 launch, Cal AI has been downloaded over five million times. More than 30% of users continue to use the app. In February 2025 alone, it generated over $2 million in revenue, and the numbers continue to grow.
Cal AI’s success is largely attributed to viral marketing. Yadegari uses his own social media feed to identify fitness influencers who can effectively promote CAL AI to their followers. As a result, Cal AI is particularly popular among young users aged 15-25.
Yadegari will graduate from high school this summer with a 4.0 GPA. Although he has been accepted to multiple universities, he plans to take a gap year to focus on Cal AI, which now has 17 employees. His goals include improving the app’s accuracy beyond 90% and expanding its appeal to users of all ages.
Resources: Techcrunch.com, Forbes.comPlay
