How 18-year-old CEO rejected by Ivy League schools built $30M AI health app

Yadegari, co-founder and CEO of Cal AI, a calorie-tracking mobile app, had begun creating what he considered "small projects" at an even younger age, and one of them has grown far beyond "small."

Launched just last year by Yadegari and two partners, Cal AI lets users track calories by taking photos of their meals and boasts a monthly revenue of several million dollars, according to financial records reviewed by Fortune.

Zach Yadegari in a photo he posted on X in April 2024. Photo from X/@zach_yadegari

Before that, he learned to code at a summer camp his mother sent him to at the age of 7 and by "binge-watching YouTube" for tutorials and coders and creators online for advice. By age 10, he was already charging $30 an hour to teach others the skill.

"I started scaling up. I posted an ad on a local Facebook group. I doubled my student body from one student I was tutoring to two," he told Forbes last November. "Then that turned into three, and for a kid at 10 years old, I felt pretty rich."

Noticing schools distributing Chromebooks to students during the Covid-19 pandemic, he created a site called "Totally Science," which brought popular games together in one place and allowed students to play them unblocked online without downloads or registration. It went on to attract 5 million users and was eventually sold for a six-figure sum.

Building on that success, he later collaborated with Henry Langmack, a fellow coder he met at a camp, to venture into consumer apps. Their initial project, Grind Clock, a motivational alarm clock inspired by David Goggins, achieved 20,000 downloads within the first two weeks but soon lost momentum.

Determined to improve, Yadegari reached out to Blake Anderson, a developer with two hit apps already under his belt. Anderson brought both funding and experience to the table, joining Yadegari and Langmack as a cofounder for Cal AI.

The idea for Cal AI, Yadegari says, stemmed from a personal goal to put on weight during his early teen years.

"I was very, very skinny my entire life growing up, and I wanted to start getting bigger and gaining weight," he told Fortune.

After realizing that most of his progress came from diet rather than exercise, he began tracking his calorie intake and eating in surplus.

However, he found that the most popular calorie-tracking app available at the time was unreliable. He ended up avoiding restaurants because he could not accurately estimate the calories and not joining his friends at the cafeteria since he was restricted to pre-portioned meals.

Making waves in a market that has remained largely stagnant for years, Cal AI offers a range of features that many of its rivals lack, from a detailed food catalog and barcode scanning to meal detection and natural language meal descriptions.

"The truth is, these apps have stagnated for years. No one wanted to innovate," Yadegari says. "This was a space waiting to be taken, and Cal AI became the disrupter."

Ivy League reject

Despite boasting a multi-million-dollar business and a 4.0 GPA and 34 ACT score to boot, Yadegari was rejected from 15 of the 18 colleges he applied to, including almost all the Ivy League schools, he shared in an X post in April.

"I didn’t expect to be accepted to all of these colleges, however, I did expect to at least be accepted to a couple of the top schools I was applying to," Yadegari told the New York Post around that time. "I think that entrepreneurial accomplishments may not be fully appreciated."

Only Georgia Tech, the University of Miami, and the University of Texas offered him admission, and he decided on Miami, but it was less about prestige and more about the campus culture.

"I’m 18, I want to hang out with other 18-year-olds. I don’t want to go straight into the business world, just yet," he said.

Having been on campus for a few weeks, Yadegari remains undecided on his major. He left the business school to take philosophy courses but still has one entrepreneurship class, which he admits he is not gaining much from since he already has real-world experience.

Even as he embraces campus life and the parties there, he doubts higher education is essential for many Gen Z to find success.

"It’s not worth it for most people, for sure, even for me," he said. "I’m having a lot of fun, I think it’s worth it for me, the second it becomes not worth it, I’m going to stop."

Looking ahead, Yadegari hopes to keep pursuing entrepreneurial dreams after college.

"I think that entrepreneurship is really cool because at the end of the day, age doesn’t really matter much," he told CNBC. "You’re either good or not good at what you do, and then the market will decide [the] results."