Featured Image Credit: d3sign/Getty Images
Topics: News, Social Media, Diet, Health
Rachael Davis
Some youngsters put the rest of us to shame when it comes to making their mark in the world, especially those who precocious enough to learn skills like coding when they’re barely out of their nursery years.
That was the case for Zach Yadegari, 18, a teenager from New York who learned to code at age 7.
Your parents may be blown away by the fact you know which socket the HDMI lead goes into, so we can only imagine the shock in the Yadegari household when their seven-year-old cracked coding well ahead of his teens.
In 2024, that early hard work reaped dividends when Zach launched his very own AI calorie counting app, Cal AI, which pulls in an estimated $1.4 million (£1.03m) each month.
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Initially running the business from his parents’ house in Roslyn, Long Island, Zach now oversees 30 employees as his app goes from strength to strength.
Anyone who’s ever tried calorie counting knows it can be a real faff, so a solution like Zach’s is understandably popular.
Users simply upload a photo of their meal, and he app’s AI software then estimates the calorie contents. Cal AI promises an average accuracy of 90%, and in time it will likely become even more accurate.
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It requires a subscription, either at $2.49 per month or $29.99 for the year, or £2.49 and £29.99 respectively in the UK.
Speaking to CNBC Make It, Yadegari explained how an early interest in games like Minecraft inspired him to explore how software is made and ultimately learn how to code before many of us have started tackling how to use commas.
After developing various apps that didn’t quite hit the mark with the zeitgeist, Zach finally landed on a hit with Cal AI.
The app, he said, was inspired by his own interest in fitness and his agitation at manual calorie counting.
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Rather than tolerate the inconvenience like the rest of us, he set about developing an AI-powered app that will do most of the legwork.
The app was co-developed with his friend Henry Langmack whom he met at a coding camp, launching the venture alongside him and a couple of friends he made on X: Blake Anderson and Jake Castillo.
The code was written by Zach and Langmack during a one-month sprint at a house in San Francisco back in July 2024.
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He spent 40 hours a week tinkering with the code whilst keeping up with his school work, somehow managing to attain a 4.0 high school GPA despite the demanding extracurricular work.
“My parents are really happy with everything with Cal AI, especially my mom. She actually uses the app," Yadegari told CNBC. “Overall, they're really proud.”
While the app is pulling in around $1.4m each month, around $770,000 is being spent on marketing and other costs that more or less eat through the gross profit for the time being.
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That said, Zach’s making a decent salary that’s already reached six figures, and it seems the sky is the limit for the fledgling tech bro.