Many 19-year-olds spend their first year of college adjusting to a new social life, but Zach Yadegari recently spent his balancing a major business deal. The University of Miami student officially sold his start-up, Cal AI, to the industry leader MyFitnessPal on March 2, 2026.
According to Inc.com, Yadegari built the app during his high school years with co-founder Henry Langmack. They wanted to fix the common frustration of manual calorie counting by letting users track their nutrition through simple photos and videos instead of searching through databases.
The development of Cal AI
As Yadegari started building software long before college, he often looked for ways new technology could simplify daily tasks. Cal AI uses computer vision to identify food and estimate portion sizes almost instantly.
As reported by Fortune, the app became popular through social media platforms where the ‘photo-to-log’ feature was a hit with younger users. By the time it was sold, the app had over 15 million downloads and was generating approximately $40 – $50 million in annual revenue, proving that small teams using AI can compete with much larger companies.
The MyFitnessPal acquisition
MyFitnessPal’s decision to buy Cal AI shows a shift in how health and fitness companies want to use generative AI. According to a press release shared by PR Newswire on March 3, 2026, the deal allows MyFitnessPal to add Cal AI’s ‘scan-to-track’ technology to its own app.
This move updates their platform for users who think traditional logging takes too much time. MyFitnessPal CEO Jim Ewel noted that the deal combines years of nutritional data with new breakthroughs in AI vision.
In the official announcement, Yadegari stated:
“We built Cal AI in our high school classrooms and grew it to one of the fastest-growing apps in the category, generating over $40 million in sales in the last 12 months. It exceeded all expectations.”
Future plans and AI vision
The sale has given him significant capital, but Yadegari has said he is not done with the tech world yet. According to TechCrunch, the entire Cal AI team has been retained to continue managing the app as a standalone division within MyFitnessPal.
His primary focus for the near future is overseeing the integration of MyFitnessPal’s massive database – which includes 20 million foods and 380 restaurant chains – into the Cal AI interface.
As reported by Forbes, he is particularly interested in how multimodal AI can change how people interact with their physical surroundings. He stated that his goal is to continue building companies that use small teams and high-level AI tools to have a massive impact without needing hundreds of employees.
The decision regarding college
His academic future remains a topic of significant public interest. Yadegari told TMZ Live that he is currently taking a gap semester from the University of Miami. While he originally joined the university to ‘learn from humans’ and enjoy a social life, he admitted that his time at college could be wrapping up early.
He noted that he is currently following a path similar to Steve Jobs by auditing only the classes he finds genuinely interesting. Whether he will return to finish his degree or drop out entirely to focus on his next business remains an open question, though he noted he is ‘very happy’ with how the financial side of the deal has allowed him this flexibility.