18-year-old Zach Yadegari sells Cal AI to MyFitnessPal after hitting $30M revenue in 2025

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Zack, finally. How you doing?

I'm good. How are you guys?

Congratulations. Tell us what happened. I want to hit the gong for you.

Well, thank you. After a year and a half journey building Cali, we were finally acquired by my fitness pal. Um,

thank you. Thank you.

When when did you meet the team at Maui Fitness?

Yeah. Yeah. Break down the deal.

We

Yeah, we spoke to them initially back in May. I was talking to a few companies, reaching out to them before going to college because it could have been if we got the right offer, it would have I think made sense. I could have maybe had a normal college life for a little is what I was thinking. We didn't move forward at that point with anything, but built those relationships and then kept in touch and when it finally made sense, we moved forward.

That's awesome.

And and I I think I saw in your announcement you closed it while you were 18 and you're just announcing it now. Is that correct?

Yeah. So, we closed it in December when I was 18 and then I turned 19 in January. So, now it's

brutal, dude. You're gone. You're now

It's over. It's over now.

Uh g give us the scale of the business, the monetization. Uh I mean for describe it for those who don't know and then I and then I want to know like how did you grow this thing? How big did it get?

Great question. Cali is an app where you could track your calories just by taking a picture of your food. And we did $30 million in revenue in 2025.

Wow.

And we just finished January. Yeah, I didn't check February, but January we did 5.7 million in revenue. It's a subscription model.

That is incredible. Uh, so heavily dependent on iOS in app subscriptions. Are you Android as well? How how important has that been?

Android is definitely less important. It's maybe a tenth of our revenue. It pretty heavily is just iOS.

Yeah. And then acquisition. Uh, what is this? Influencer driven, ad driven, uh, customer.

Yeah. Customer acquisition. I mean uh uh obviously you're on the charts but uh are there viral mechanics like what is the growth engine for the app?

Early on it was mainly influencers and then as of recently the last maybe 6 months we've primarily continued our growth through paid acquisition on channels like Meta and so the two combined are really what's driving it.

Makes sense. What uh why what what are the kind of key reasons why My Fitness Pal wanted to pick you guys up? I can think of a lot but uh what what what drove this?

Well, definitely many many reasons. We have different audiences, different core audiences, but then we also have overlap

and we both are very missiondriven. We both just want to help the greatest number of people as possible become healthier. And so since we were since we have this overlapping space, we realized that it would make sense to come together, share resources, and it would further the mission for both of us and really makes sense to just partner.

Talk about accuracy. I think there's some people that are skeptical that AI can take a picture of food and tell you how many calories are in it. Uh how has that evolved over the year or so that you've been running the company? Like how accurate was it at the start? How accurate is it now? Where do you expect it to go? The accuracy of Cali early on it definitely wasn't as good as it is today. We initially started by just running CHBT by itself pretty much as the model. You would just take the picture would put it into CHBT say how many calories is this?

Yeah.

Output the response total rapper victory.

Total rapper victory. Honestly, congratulations. It's so amazing.

Well, that was like a month. Yeah.

And then we fine-tuned a model. We built a more complex pipeline using like a ton of different models for different steps. And so it's become more and more accurate over time. At this point, we average over 90% accuracy for each food scan. But you would actually be surprised only 30% of the scans are only 30% of food logs come from scanning. The rest are like barcodes typing in in the database. So that those are the most accurate methods.

That makes a ton of sense. That makes a ton of sense.

Very cool. What uh what are your guys' combined ambitions now? Where do you want to take? Uh are are you going to be supporting on the main My Fitness Pal app as well? Like are you I imagine like they've seen what you guys can do from a user acquisition standpoint and a product design standpoint and and want your help across the org.

We're definitely helping any way we can. So definitely some of our marketing systems we are helping them to also build out and they're helping us too, teaching us things that we didn't know. So together we're going to be able to go a lot further and we're going to remain standalone apps.

Cool. Well, congratulations.

Well, congrats. Yeah, congrats to the whole team. Uh yeah, you're

an actual overnight success.

Truly truly an overnight success,

but the beginning of a long career. I can tell already.

Yeah, I know. I can't I can't wait till we'll be here when you're when you turn 40. Probably your third

exit at that point. Hopefully an IPO.

You got the you got the exit at 18. We'd like to see the the IPO by 20 uh by the time you're uh you're 30.

Awesome.

Well, congratulations. We'll talk to you. Congrats.

Thank you. Talk soon.

Have a good one.

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