After deal talks lasting almost a year, MyFitnessPal has successfully acquired its up-and-coming rival Cal AI.
Cal AI is the AI calorie counting app startup built by two high school teenagers that soared to over 15 million downloads and over $30 million in annual revenue in under two years, MyFitnessPal tells TechCrunch.
The Cal AI team of seven employees, including its co-founder CEO Zach Yadegari (pictured, above), plus a small team of contractors, have been retained by MyFitnessPal (MFP), according to MyFitnessPal CEO Mike Fisher.
The Cal AI app will remain independent, with its same ease-of-use mission: estimating calories by taking pictures of food. One upgrade for Cal AI users has occurred already since the deal closed in December: The AI app has now been integrated with MFP’s huge nutrition database. That database spans 20 million foods, 68,500 brands, and meals served at 380+ restaurant chains.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed except that Fisher noted that since the Cal AI team didn’t have to sell, they were happy with the offer. With that $30 million revenue number, we can make an educated guess that this was a good outcome for the now 19-year-old co-founders, Yadegari, and his high school friend Henry Langmack.
In fact, the deal took considerable perseverance, Fisher said. The larger company noticed Cal AI as it started to rise in the ranks on the app store, visible through tools like Sensor Tower, he said.
“We watch the entire competitor suite,” Fisher said, which, he said, encompasses some 70 competitors big and small. “They definitely caught our eye, I would say, early last year, and we have been talking to them ever since, on and off.”
What convinced Fisher and team to pursue the acquisition wasn’t just watching Cal AI rise on app download charts (the two are neck-and-neck in the top rankings in their category on Sensor Tower) — he was also impressed with the focus of the team run under its young CEO.
“They got a lot of media attention because they’re pretty young, and it’s easy to dismiss,” he said, “You have a conversation with them, like I did late spring last year, and you walk away saying this is an impressive young man.”
For instance, Cal AI’s regular stand-up meeting occurs on Sunday night. Because the founders are still in school, Yadegari works all weekend on his startup and his team is dedicated enough to join him on Sundays for a weekly check in.
“So it’s small, small details like that, that when you put them together, you say, this is someone who’s not doing this as a hobby,” Fisher said. “They’re really serious about it.”
Fisher declined to specify how long the retention period was for the founders and team to remain at MyFitnessPal post-acquisition. Four years is a pretty industry-standard term, often tied to payouts, though again, he wouldn’t comment on it, even when pressed.
We do, however, know that Yadegari is still running the app, now as a unit of MFP, while attending college. The young founder also went viral last year on X after he revealed that out of 18 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 hadn’t intended on going to college at all and instead wanted to focus on his company. But then a summer at a hacker house surrounded by a bunch of classic Silicon Valley college dropouts made him see that his options would remain forever better with a college degree.
Fisher said MFP currently has no plans at the moment to integrate the app into its main product, such as replacing MFP’s current photo-meal scan feature, nor to peel Cal AI users away. He believes that the apps serve different markets.
Cal AI is for those preferring speed over accuracy. MFP is for those wanting the reverse. “We both do meal scan, right? So, take a picture of your meal, we both do it,” Fisher said. But if MFP users take a picture of a hamburger, they can fine-tune the inputs right down to specifying three pickles, not two. With Cal AI, “We realized that there is an audience of people that want it fast, they want AI based. They want it to not interfere with their life and not have to think about it much.”