MyFitnessPal has acquired Cal AI, a calorie tracking app developed by teenagers

After nearly a year of negotiations, MyFitnessPal has successfully acquired the upcoming Cal AI.

Cal AI is the AI ​​calorie counter app built by two high school teenagers that grew to more than 15 million downloads and more than $30 million a year in two years, MyFitnessPal tells TechCrunch.

Cal AI’s team of seven employees, including senior co-founder Zach Yadegari (pictured above), plus a small team of contractors, has been retained by MyFitnessPal (MFP), according to MyFitnessPal CEO Mike Fisher.

The Cal AI program will remain independent, with the same intended use: calculating calories from food images. One change for Cal AI users has already occurred since the deal closed in December: The AI ​​program is now integrated with MFP’s main food database. The database covers 20 million foods, 68,500 varieties, and meals served in 380+ restaurants.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed except that Fisher said that since the Cal AI team did not have to sell, they were happy with the offer. With a net worth of 30 million dollars, we can imagine that this was a good result for the now 19-year-old, Yadegari, and his high school friend Henry Langmack.

In fact, the partnership had to endure, Fisher said. The big company became aware of Cal AI when it started to gain traction in the software market, visible through devices such as Sensor Tower, he said.

“We watch the entire competition,” said Fisher, who said it includes 70 competitors, both large and small. “They really caught us, I would say, early last year, and we’ve been talking to them ever since, back and forth.”

What convinced Fisher and the team to complete the purchase wasn’t just watching Cal AI climb the app download charts (the two are neck-and-neck. in the top rankings in their category on the Sensor Tower) – also impressed with the focus of the team run by their young CEO.

“They get a lot of media attention because they’re young, and it’s easy to get rid of them,” he said.

For example, Cal AI’s regular conference is held on Sunday nights. Because the founders are still in school, Yadegari works all weekend and his team has volunteered to contact him on Sundays to join them every week.

“Because it’s little things, little things like this, that when you add it up, you say, this is a guy who’s not doing this for fun,” Fisher said. “They’re really sure about it.”

Fisher declined to say how long the retention period was for the founders and the team to stay with MyFitnessPal after the acquisition. Four years is a good time for the company, which is often tied to the payments, and again, they would not respond, even if they were forced to.

However, we know that Yadegari is still using the program, now as part of the MFP, going to college. The young founder was also infected last year on X after revealing that out of 18 top colleges he applied to, despite having a 4.0 GPA and a successful company, he was rejected by 15.

He told TechCrunch at the time that he didn’t want to go to college at all and instead wanted to focus on his company. But a summer in a hacker house surrounded by a group of Silicon Valley college dropouts made him see that his options would be forever better with a college degree.

Fisher said MFP currently has no plans to integrate the program into its main product, such as changing the current MFP interface, or removing Cal AI users. It is believed that these programs serve different markets.

Cal AI is for those who prefer speed over accuracy. MFP is for those who want a change. “We all do a food scanner, right? Take a picture of your food, we all do,” Fisher said. But if MFP users take a picture of a hamburger, they can fine-tune the input to specify three pickles, not two. With Cal AI, “We realized there’s a group of people who want it fast, they want native AI. They want it to be less disruptive to their lives and less critical.”