MyFitnessPal has acquired Cal AI, the widely used calorie app created by teens

After nearly a year of talks, MyFitnessPal has successfully acquired rising rival Cal AI.

Cal AI is an AI-powered calorie counting startup created by two high school teens that has generated more than 15 million downloads and more than $30 million in annual revenue in less than two years, MyFitnessPal tells TechCrunch.

The Cal AI team of seven employees, including founding CEO Zach Yadgary (pictured above), as well as a small team of contractors, have been retained by MyFitnessPal, according to MyFitnessPal CEO Mike Fisher.

The Cal AI app will remain standalone, with the same ease-of-use mission: estimate calories by taking photos of food. One upgrade has already occurred for Cal AI users since the deal closed in December: the AI ​​application is now integrated with MFP’s massive nutrition database. This database includes 20 million foods and 68,500 brands and meals served at more than 380 restaurant chains.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed except that Fisher noted that since the Cal AI team did not have to sell, they were happy with the offer. With a revenue figure of $30 million, we can make a safe guess that this was a good result for the co-founders, now 19-year-old Yadegari, and his high school friend Henry Langmack.

The deal actually took a great deal of perseverance, Fisher said. Cal AI was noticed by the larger company when it started to rise in the App Store ranks, and can be seen through tools like Sensor Tower, he said.

“We’re monitoring the entire pool of competitors,” which includes about 70 large and small competitors, Fisher said. “They definitely caught our attention, I would say, early last year, and we’ve been talking to them ever since, off and on.”

What convinced Fisher and his team to pursue an acquisition wasn’t just watching Cal AI’s rise on the app download charts (the two compete for the top rankings in their category on Sensor Tower). He was also impressed by the focus of the team led by his young CEO.

“They get a lot of media attention because they’re so young, it’s easy to dismiss them. You have a conversation with them, like I did in the late spring of last year, and you walk away saying that’s an impressive young man,” he said.

For example, Cal AI’s regular stand-up meeting is held on Sunday evening. Since the founders are still in school, Yadegari works throughout the weekend on his startup and his team is dedicated enough to join him on Sundays for a weekly check-up.

“It’s a very small detail, and when you put it together, it says this person is not doing this as a hobby,” Fisher said. “They’re really serious about this.”

Fisher declined to say how long the founders and staff will retain MyFitnessPal after the acquisition. Four years is a standard term in the industry, often associated with payments, though he did not comment on it again, even when pressed.

However, we know that Yadegari is still running the app, now as an MFP, while attending university. The young founder also went viral last year on X after he revealed that out of 18 of the top colleges he applied to, even with a 4.0 GPA and a successful company, he was rejected by 15.

He told TechCrunch at the time that he had no intention of going to college at all, and instead wanted to focus on his company. But then a summer spent at a hacker’s house surrounded by a group of Silicon Valley college dropouts made him see that his options would forever be better if he earned a college degree.

MFP currently has no plans to integrate the app into its main product, such as replacing MFP’s existing meal scanning feature, nor exclude Cal AI users, Fisher said. He believes that apps serve different markets.

Cal AI is for those who prefer speed over accuracy. MFP is for those who want the opposite. “We both do meal checks, right? So take a picture of your meal, we both do that,” Fisher said. But if MFP users take a photo of a hamburger, they can adjust the input down to selecting three pickles, not two. With Cal AI, “we realized that there is an audience of people who want their wish to be fast, and who want AI to adopt. They want it to not interfere in their lives and not have to think about it as much.”