A Roslyn High School AI entrepreneur, whose calorie-tracking app he claims has generated over $30 million in revenue, is off to the University of Miami after receiving rejection letters from Ivy League universities.
Zachary Yadegari, the co-founder and CEO of the calorie-tracking app Cal AI, which purports to analyze the number of calories and macronutrients in food just by scanning an image, announced his college decision one month after he shared his college admission essay on his former Twitter page X and received nearly 40 million views.
“I have officially committed to Umiami,” Yadegari said on his X page.
More than 3.5 million people have downloaded the calorie-tracking app Cal AI since its launch one year ago. Yadegari said the app’s food scanning technology is more than 90% accurate, as long as the user scans the right foods.
Yadegari said that when scanning foods with one ingredient, like an apple, the app’s AI algorithm will detect the food automatically based on a dataset of hundreds of foods and will provide the user with nutritional information like calories, carbs, protein and fat.
Foods with many ingredients or layered ingredients, like a salad, will produce less accurate results, however. Yadegari said that in those cases, users can manually input each ingredient to improve the accuracy of the results.
Before creating Cal AI one year ago, Yadegari created a website where students could play games on their computers while bypassing the school district’s content filters. Yadegari said he sold that website when he was 16 years old for over $100,000 and when the site reached over 5 million visitors.
Yadegari then launched his first app, Grind Clock, an alarm clock that would wake users up to the sounds of “motivational speakers” like Steve Harvey or influencers like David Goggins and Andrew Tate.
As Cal AI continued gaining traction over the past year, Yadegari began applying to colleges, shooting his shot at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and more. But as rejections came left and right, and college decision day approached, Yadegari posted his college admission essay, discussing Cal AI’s success and saying he wanted to do more.
“In this next chapter, I want to learn from humans-both professors and students-not just from computers and textbooks,” Yadegari wrote in his essay.
Of the more than 2,400 comments made on his post, many supported Yadegari and said he was too good for the top colleges, while others said the essay cast the tech entrepreneur as materialistic.
Since creating that post over a month ago, Yadegari has appeared in media worldwide, including CBS News, The Times of India, TMZ, Fox, and, of course, Schneps Media LI.
“I think that college admissions tries to place students in this rubric, a very tight box, that makes it very difficult for students that have achievements outside of school, like an entrepreneur, to stand out,” Yadegari told Fox News.
With Yadegari off to the University of Miami, he will also be rolling out Cal AI’s next planned feature: a body scanner that can break down a person’s fat and muscle percentages just by scanning an image.
