In a world filled with “Vibe coding”, Zach Yadegari, founder of Cal he teens, stands in contrasting, old -fashioned.
Ironically because Yadegar and his co -founder, Henry Langmack, are both only 18 years old and have recently graduated in high school. However, their story, so far, is a classic.
Launched in May, Cal has generated over 5 million downloads in eight months, says Yadegar. Better still, he tells Techcrunch that the customer’s level is over 30% and that the app generated over $ 2 million last month.
Although Techcrunch cannot prove his allegations of download and income, Cal he has a 4.8 -star rating on Apple App Store, with 66,000 comments, and over 1 million downloads on Google Play with a 4.8 -star rating at nearly 75,000 comments.
The concept is simple: take a photo of the food you are ready to consume, and let it record calories and macros for you.
It’s not a unique idea. For example, the big dog in the calorie count, Myfitnespal, has its own meal scan feature. Then there are apps like Snapcalorie, which was released in 2023 and was created by Google Lens founder.
The advantage of Cal he, perhaps, is that it is built entirely at the age of large models of images. He uses models from anthropic and Openai and Rag to improve accuracy and has been trained in open source food calories and image databases from pages like Github.
“We have discovered that different models are better with different foods,” Yadegaari Techcrunch tells.
Along the way, the founders coded through technical problems such as recognizing ingredients from food packages or in confused dishes.
The result is an application that creators say is 90% accurate, which seems to be good enough for many diets.
Adolescent coders and a hacker house
Yadegar is also gaining a fame for his early success. But unlike teenage coders growing up with copilots, he was possessing Python and c# in high school, he said.
Yadegar built his first ninth grade business and sold it for $ 100,000 at another game company, Freazenova, when he was 16, he tells Techcrunch. “After the quarantine, schools gave Chromebooks to all their students and surprisingly, the children tried to abuse this by playing school games,” he said.
The school responded by blocking internet access to those game sites. So he “saw an opportunity” to build an online website that gave the opportunity to all unlocked games.
The best part? He called the website “totally science” so that the school does not block it as well.
With that sale, he and Langmack watched the Y combker videos and were accompanied by the coder’s crowd on X looking for a new idea. He met with Blake Anderson on X, who also became co -founder of Cal. Anderson, now 24, had won the announcement as a new coder of consumer applications, as well, for creating chatgt dating apps such as Rizzgt and Umax.
Yadegar and Langmack had their idea as Yadegar began to hit the gym to gain weight and “impress the girls,” he said, smiling.
Then they made another cliché choice: they moved to San Francisco to live in a hacker house as they built their prototype.
But while he was there, Yadegar, the son of two lawyers, learned a contrasting lesson. He revealed that he wanted to go to college and not become a classic 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 that taught me a lot,” he told the experience.
But he looked around. “We were surrounded by people who were in the late 20s or 30s all day long. And I realized that if I didn’t go to college, that would be life.”
While he has not yet determined which university they will participate in, he and Langmack are still having fun running their company. Now he includes another co -founder, Jake Castillo, 28 who is COO and runs influential marketing, as well as eight full -time employees among developers, a designer and social media managers.
