Zach Yadegari

As a high school freshman he built the gaming website Totally Science; CBSCBSCBS is an American commercial broadcast television network. It was founded in 1927 as United Independent Broadcasters, renamed the Columbia Broadcasting System in 1928, and grew from a radio network into a television network under William S. Paley. With ABC and NBC it is one of the three traditional U.S. broadcast networks; it has been owned in turn by Westinghouse, Viacom, ViacomCBS and Paramount Global, has been owned by Paramount Skydance Corporation since 2025, and is one of the five networks that rotate in the White House television pool.Open the full entry New York puts his age at the time at 14. TechCrunchTechCrunchTechCrunch is an American technology news outlet founded in 2005 by Michael Arrington and Keith Teare and headquartered in San Francisco; it mainly covers technology companies, startups, and venture capital, and hosts events such as TechCrunch Disrupt. Its ownership passed successively through AOL, Verizon, and Yahoo, and in 2025 Regent announced its acquisition.Open the full entry writes that after the school blocked the game sites students were playing in class, he built one that gave access to unblocked games and named it “Totally Science” so that the school would not block it too. “After quarantine, schools gave out Chromebooks to all of their students,” he recalled.⁠[1][2][3]

He recalled that the site grew to 5 million users over two years and was making about $60,000 a month from banner ads he placed on it, his first six-figure income.⁠[4][5]

In February 2024, at the age of 16, he sold Totally Science to the game company FreezeNova for about $100,000.⁠[3][1]

While looking for a new idea, he and Henry Langmack watched Y Combinator videos and socialized with the coder crowd on X looking for a new idea. The idea for Cal AI came from his own experience: he had started going to the gym to gain weight, at first, he said, “to impress the girls at my school,” and found logging food by hand tedious, calling the calorie-tracking app he had used “an awful experience.”⁠[1][3][4]

He took the idea to partners: Henry Langmack, a friend from coding camp, and Blake Anderson (entrepreneur)Blake Anderson (entrepreneur)Blake Anderson is a mobile app entrepreneur who taught himself to code with the help of ChatGPT in 2023, launched the AI dating-advice app RizzGPT and the face-rating app Umax, and in 2024 co-founded the calorie-tracking app Cal AI with Zach Yadegari and others; he has also founded 10x and is a mentor at Founders School.Open the full entry and Jake Castillo, whom he had met on X; the four launched Cal AI in May 2024. Henry Langmack wrote the app’s code with him; Blake Anderson (entrepreneur), previously known for the ChatGPTChatGPTChatGPT is a generative AI assistant launched by OpenAI on November 30, 2022. Through websites and applications, it provides conversation, writing, coding, search, file analysis, and image and voice interaction. It evolved from a free research preview into personal, enterprise and education plans, gradually adding deep research, Study mode and cross-application task execution. Its use has prompted continuing discussions about factual accuracy, personal privacy, copyright, education and teen safety.Open the full entry-based dating-advice apps RizzGPT and Umax, paid the company’s operating and marketing costs for the first six months; Jake Castillo served as chief operating officer and ran influencer marketing.⁠[4][3][1]

On the partners’ ages, TechCrunch’s March 2025 article gives him and Henry Langmack as 18, Blake Anderson (entrepreneur) as 24 and Jake Castillo as 28; CNBCCNBCCNBC is an American business and financial news cable channel launched by NBC in 1989; it merged with its rival FNN in 1991 and since January 2026 has been part of Versant Media Group, spun off from Comcast.Open the full entry Make It’s September 2025 article gives Blake Anderson (entrepreneur) as 24 and Jake Castillo as 30.⁠[1][3]

Cal AI went live in May 2024 from his parents’ home in Roslyn, New York. Users photograph their food and the app estimates its calories and macronutrients; the founders put its accuracy at about 90%. The app uses models from Anthropic and OpenAIOpenAIOpenAI is an artificial intelligence research and product organization founded in 2015 that develops the GPT model series, ChatGPT, Codex and a developer API, and conducts research on image, speech, video and intelligent agents. After its 2025 restructuring, the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation continues to control the for-profit OpenAI Group PBC. Its growth has involved large-scale fundraising and compute partnerships, and has also been accompanied by controversies over governance, copyright, privacy and AI safety.Open the full entry together with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and was trained on open-source food-calorie and image databases from sites such as GitHub; “We have found that different models are better with different foods,” he said.⁠[3][1][2]

The app is free to download, with subscriptions at $2.49 a month or $29.99 a year. The team first spent $2,000 on a social media marketing test; he recalled that revenue was more than $28,000 in the first month and $115,000 in the second. Early growth, he said, came from TikTok videos and influencer partnerships: “We started making TikToks, we started partnering with influencers, and then we had pretty explosive growth.”⁠[3][4]

In July 2024 he and Henry Langmack stayed in a San Francisco “hacker house,” where they interviewed job candidates; Fortune writes that he moved to San Francisco with his co-founders at that point to focus and hire about 15 employees. “We were surrounded by people that were in their late 20s or 30s all day,” he recalled, and said the experience made him realize that “if I didn't go to college, this is what life would be like.”⁠[3][4][1]

After the summer he returned to Roslyn High School while working about 40 hours a week on the app. He described the job as a responsibility he did not take lightly: “I can't just go away for a few months and neglect things, like I could have with previous projects.”⁠[3]

When TechCrunch profiled Cal AI on March 16, 2025, he said the app had passed 5 million downloads in eight months with a customer retention rate above 30%, and that revenue the previous month had exceeded $2 million; TechCrunch noted that it could not verify the download and revenue figures. At the time the app had about 66,000 reviews with a 4.8 rating on AppleAppleApple is a public technology company founded in 1976 and headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Its business includes the iPhone, Mac, iPad, wearables, and services such as digital content, payments, and cloud storage. The company builds its product system through in-house hardware, operating systems, and services.Open the full entry’s App Store, and more than 1 million downloads, nearly 75,000 reviews and a 4.8 rating on Google PlayGoogle PlayGoogle Play is a digital content distribution service operated by Google, centered on the Google Play Store, the app store for Android devices. Its predecessor, Android Market, launched in October 2008 alongside the first Android phone, and in March 2012 it merged with Google Music and the Google eBookstore and was renamed Google Play. As the main distribution channel for Android apps, its commissions, billing rules, and review practices have drawn controversy, including the Epic Games antitrust lawsuit in the United States and penalties under the European Union’s Digital Markets Act.Open the full entry. The company had eight full-time employees (developers, a designer and social media managers) plus its chief operating officer, Jake Castillo.⁠[1]

TechCrunch listed competing products including MyFitnessPal’s Meal Scan feature and SnapCalorie, released in 2023 by the founder of Google Lens.⁠[1]

He had not planned to go to college but changed his mind in order to experience college life and learn from the people around him. With a 4.0 high school GPA and an ACT score of 34, he applied to 18 top colleges and was rejected by 15. On April 1, 2025, he listed on X the schools that turned him down: Stanford UniversityStanford UniversityStanford University is a research university in California founded by Leland and Jane Stanford in 1885 and opened in 1891.Open the full entry, MIT, Harvard UniversityHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry, Yale UniversityYale UniversityYale University is a research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Its predecessor, the Collegiate School, received a charter in 1701. Trustees chose New Haven in 1716; the institution became Yale College in 1718 and Yale University in 1887. Yale provides undergraduate, graduate and professional education and has 14 undergraduate residential colleges. As of October 2026, its president was Maurie McInnis, who took office in July 2024. In 2026, Yale expanded aid for incoming undergraduates and celebrated its 325th anniversary.Open the full entry, Washington University in St. Louis, Columbia UniversityColumbia UniversityColumbia University, formally Columbia University in the City of New York, is a private research university in New York City and a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1754 by royal charter from King George II as King's College, it is the oldest institution of higher education in New York State and the fifth oldest in the United States. It was renamed Columbia College in 1784 and adopted the university name and moved to Manhattan's Morningside Heights in 1896. It has 17 schools and four affiliated colleges, with 35,978 students enrolled in fall 2025. Legal scholar Jennifer L. Mnookin became president on July 1, 2026.Open the full entry, the University of PennsylvaniaUniversity of PennsylvaniaThe University of Pennsylvania, commonly called Penn, is a private research university and Ivy League member in Philadelphia. It traces its origins to a 1740 charity-school project; Benjamin Franklin proposed his academy in 1749, classes began in 1751, and a 1791 merger established the institution under its present name. Penn has 12 schools, with undergraduate education concentrated in arts and sciences, engineering, nursing and Wharton. Enrollment totaled 29,384 in fall 2025, and the fiscal 2025 endowment was $24.81 billion. As of October 2026, J. Larry Jameson was president, with his term scheduled to end on June 30, 2027.Open the full entry, Princeton UniversityPrinceton UniversityPrinceton University is a private university and Ivy League member in Princeton, New Jersey. Chartered on October 22, 1746 as the College of New Jersey, it moved to Princeton in 1756 and adopted its present name in 1896. Undergraduate education leads to A.B. and B.S.E. degrees and emphasizes small-group discussion, independent research and residential college life. Graduate education spans the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and engineering. As of October 2026, Christopher L. Eisgruber was president. Its 2026–27 operating budget was $3.407 billion, including $342 million for undergraduate aid.Open the full entry, Duke University, the University of Southern CaliforniaUniversity of Southern CaliforniaThe University of Southern California (USC) is a private research university in Los Angeles, California, planned by a group led by Judge Robert Maclay Widney and opened to students in 1880.Open the full entry, the University of Virginia, New York UniversityNew York UniversityNew York University is a private university in New York City, founded in 1831, and one of the largest private universities in the United States.Open the full entry, Vanderbilt University, Brown UniversityBrown UniversityBrown University is a private nonprofit research university in Providence, Rhode Island, and a member of the Ivy League. Chartered by Rhode Island's colonial legislature in 1764, it is known for its undergraduate Open Curriculum, which has no common required core. Christina H. Paxson, president since July 2012, announced on August 3, 2026, that the 2026–27 academic year would be her last in office. As of October 1, 2026, the search for Brown's 20th president remained underway.Open the full entry and Cornell UniversityCornell UniversityCornell University is a private research university in Ithaca, New York, and a member of the Ivy League. It is New York State's federal land-grant university, a distinction unique within the Ivy League. Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White founded the university in 1865, and it opened in 1868. In addition to its Ithaca campus, Cornell operates Weill Cornell Medicine and Cornell Tech in New York City and a medical college in Qatar. It enrolled 26,793 students in fall 2024. Its president is Michael I. Kotlikoff.Open the full entry; he was admitted to Georgia Tech, the University of Texas and the University of Miami.⁠[6][5]

He was sure his essay was the problem and posted it in full on X. The post drew more than 22 million views, more than 2,700 reposts and more than 3,600 comments; some commenters called the essay “arrogant,” while others pointed out that colleges look for candidates who seem eager for education and likely to graduate. Garry TanGarry TanGarry Tan is a Canadian-born ethnically Chinese technology entrepreneur, product design and engineering practitioner, and venture capitalist who currently serves as president, CEO, and general partner of Y Combinator. He worked on early product and engineering at Palantir, co-founded Posterous, Posthaven, and Initialized Capital, led early investments in companies including Coinbase, and has long been involved in San Francisco local public affairs.Open the full entry of Y Combinator posted on X that he too had been widely rejected and waitlisted, because he had rewritten his essays after reading Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead.⁠[6]

“Ultimately, I'll never know exactly why I was turned down,” he said, adding that he hoped admissions offices would see him as authentic; he also said, “I realized that life was not just about financial success.” When TechCrunch covered the episode in April 2025, he was 17 and still in high school.⁠[6]

In May 2025 CBS New York profiled him as a high school senior and the founder and chief executive of Cal AI. He said starting the business had required only a computer and coding skills, and demonstrated the app on a sushi lunch, which it identified as rice, salmon, avocado and spicy mayo and estimated at 400 calories. The station noted more than five million downloads, projected annual revenue of $30 million, and 17 employees across four continents and several time zones.⁠[2]

“Despite my 4.0 GPA and 34 ACT, I was rejected from all the top schools I applied to,” he said, arguing that colleges sort applicants into boxes that do not account for entrepreneurial achievement. He also said: “I'm still a normal high schooler. I'm going to prom in a couple of months.”⁠[2]

In August 2025 he began undergraduate classes at the University of Miami’s business school; Fortune writes that he chose Miami for its social environment rather than its academic prestige. He later left the business school, remained undeclared and took philosophy classes instead, while still taking one entrepreneurship class from which he said he gained little.⁠[3][4][5]

“I never wanted to go to college,” he said, recalling that he used to argue with his parents over the conventional path of good grades, a good college, a degree and a job; he described college as “paying $100,000 a year for a vacation.” He lives in Miami with a group of app-building friends aged 18 to 26 and said he parties almost every night at an off-campus mansion.⁠[4][3]

In October 2025 he said college was “not worth it for most people, for sure, even for me,” yet worth it for him for now; he said he had time to make money later, regarded the cost as an investment in memories, and would stop attending if it ceased to be worthwhile. CNBC Make It wrote in September 2025 that he did not plan to stay in college for more than a year.⁠[5][3]

Documents reviewed by CNBC Make It showed Cal AI earning roughly $1.4 million a month in gross profit after app-store fees and nearly $274,000 a month in net operating income, while spending nearly $770,000 a month on advertising and marketing; a spokesperson put downloads at 8.3 million as of July 2025. The company had 30 employees, and he had received dividends, the most recent of them $100,000.⁠[3]

Financial records reviewed by Fortune showed several million dollars in monthly revenue; Fortune put annual revenue at about $30 million and the team at more than 30 people, and wrote that investors had tried to put money into the company but the founders turned them down.⁠[4]

He and the app-building friends he lives with also run App Mafia, a community that teaches app building online. In an Instagram video on August 23, 2025, he promoted a mobile app development course he had co-launched, and was shown driving a Lamborghini with a “CAL AI” license plate. “We're going to have a lot of ideas for shaping the future,” he said.⁠[4][3]

He said he wanted Cal AI to become “the biggest calorie-tracking app,” which would mean overtaking MyFitnessPal, which says it has more than 270 million users; he planned to run Cal AI for about two more years and then sell it or hand it to another chief executive. Of his next venture he said he was not entirely sure, only that it would involve AI: “Ideally, it really shapes the future and is part of my legacy.”⁠[3]

On October 22, 2025, the University of Miami student newspaper The Miami Hurricane profiled him as a freshman: Cal AI had been downloaded more than 10 million times and was bringing in more than $3 million in a single month; users could pay $9.99 a month or pay a year in advance at an average of $2.49 a month, and the app also tracks weight, body measurements, nutrition goals, water intake and exercise.⁠[7]

In the article he recalled trying other calorie-tracking apps in his freshman year of high school and learning quickly that “the best way to actually put on weight isn't by working out”; he “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.” He and a friend spent about a month coding the first version; this article puts revenue at $30,000 in the first month and about $150,000 in the second, which differs from CNBC Make It’s figures of more than $28,000 and $115,000. That summer they moved to San Francisco, lived in their office and hired their first employees.⁠[7][3]

The article states that his co-founder Blake Anderson (entrepreneur) mentored him on marketing, drawing on the success of two earlier apps; a few hundred fitness influencers post about the app each month, and he believes it would not have done as well without social media. “All the money that was put into this company was between the co-founders,” he said. To users who say the app cannot detect hidden ingredients such as oil, he replied that it is more than 90% accurate on its own and uses a “standard amount” for hidden ingredients, and that users can enter ingredients by hand and edit recipes.⁠[7]

The article notes that his X post of his college results reached more than 28 million people, among them the mayor of Miami. Of choosing the University of Miami he said: “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.” He lives off campus with other young founders and planned to make App Mafia a creator house along the lines of the Hype House or Faze House, producing content about app development in the hope to “cause a movement” by showing that anyone can build a software company. “Traditionally, you'd have to pay for a trainer, but now AI can personalize everything for you,” he said.⁠[7]

On March 2, 2026, TechCrunch published an article stating that MyFitnessPal had acquired Cal AI; the article states that the deal closed in December 2025 after on-and-off talks lasting almost a year, and that the price and other terms were not disclosed. A later TechCrunch article, from October 2026, describes MyFitnessPal as having acquired Cal AI in March 2026.⁠[8][9]

MyFitnessPal’s chief executive, Mike Fisher, said the company watches its entire field of competitors, about 70 of them, and first noticed Cal AI in early 2025; after talking with him, Fisher called him “an impressive young man” and said the founders were “really serious about it.” TechCrunch writes that Cal AI’s weekly stand-up is held on Sunday night and that he works on the company all weekend. Fisher also said the Cal AI team did not have to sell and was happy with the offer.⁠[8]

By MyFitnessPal’s figures, Cal AI had passed 15 million downloads and more than $30 million in annual revenue in under two years. At the time of the deal the company had seven employees including him, plus a small group of contractors, all of whom were retained; Cal AI continued as an independent app and was connected to MyFitnessPal’s nutrition database. TechCrunch wrote that he, at 19, was still running Cal AI as a unit of MyFitnessPal while attending college, and that his high school friend Henry Langmack, also 19, was a co-founder.⁠[8]

After the acquisition he and his co-founders initially joined MyFitnessPal to keep developing Cal AI; he left in June 2026.⁠[9]

On October 8, 2026, TechCrunch wrote that his new company, Persona, had raised $10 million in a round led by Vine Ventures, with Z Fellows founder Cory Levy and Collective Global participating; a second co-founder had not yet been announced. Persona builds a personal AI assistant that users reach through a free beta on iMessage, which he said had “a few thousand” beta users; it also offers a $179 wearable band, expected to ship in December 2026, which he said had brought in five figures in preorder revenue.⁠[9][10]

The band does not listen all the time; a button press or a flick of the wrist activates it. The AI model runs in Persona’s cloud, data are encrypted in transit and at rest, and users can delete their data. The assistant can order food or rides, take notes, book travel and answer questions and emails; it cannot see credit-card details, purchases need the user’s approval, and payment goes through outside providers such as Stripe Link. The business model relies on advertising, and he said user data would not be sold to advertisers. Persona’s website carries the line “Made in Miami, USAUnited StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry.”⁠[9][10]

He predicted that all utility apps will “collapse into a single super app powered by an AI assistant,” and said he hopes Persona will eventually “offer help and solve problems before you even know you have a problem.”⁠[9]

As of November 2026, the mentor list on Founders School’s website includes him, with the affiliation “CalAI.”⁠[11]

He is from Long Island, New York; both of his parents are lawyers, and his mother is Debi Yadegari. When he was 7, his mother, prompted by his love of online games such as Minecraft, sent him to a summer camp to learn coding; he then taught himself from YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry tutorials and reached out to coders and content creators for advice.⁠[2][1][3]

He learned Python and C# in middle school. His teachers say that by 10 he was leading his classmates in coding; Fortune writes that from the age of 10 he gave coding lessons at $30 an hour. At 12 he won hackathons against college students and published his first app, Speed Soccer, on the App Store. “Everything I built up to that point was free,” he recalled.⁠[1][2][4]

He said his parents support him and that his mother uses Cal AI: “She actually uses the app.” His mother, Debi Yadegari, said: “Late at night, he's actually conducting business. I shrug and go back to bed.” His friends describe him as humble.⁠[3][2]

MAU Vegas, a conference for mobile app growth professionals, lists him among its past speakers as chief executive of Cal AI; the speaker biography states that Cal AI has $30 million in annual revenue and ranks sixth in the Health & Fitness category.⁠[12]

Cal AI: Official website: https://www.calai.app/ (opens in a new window).⁠[13]

Persona: Official website: https://yourpersona.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[10][9]

Founders School: Official website: https://founders.school/ (opens in a new window).⁠[11]

X: Public account: https://x.com/zach_yadegari (opens in a new window).⁠[6][14]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zachyadegari (opens in a new window).⁠[12]