The Lycra-legacy of Olivia Newton-John comes to mind, each time a new fitness app hits the App Store. It’s time for Cal AI, which has been downloaded over a million times. Does it help? We have just started using it and the road forward looks promising.
In the video for Let’s Get Physical, the singer bounces around a gym, training out-of-shape men. None of that is happening but for the next few months, photos of all that goes down the throat will be taken and logged into the app.
Cal AI is old-fashioned. The paid app (it has a three-day trial period on iOS) asks you a few simple questions — date of birth, current weight and the weight you want to achieve as well as what’s holding you back from losing weight. You can also use the app to put on weight.
The founders of the app are Zach Yadegari and Henry Langmack, both in their teens and they recently graduated from high school.
According to TechCrunch, Cal AI enjoys a customer retention rate of over 30 per cent and the app generated over $2 million in revenue last month.
Yadegari has been building companies since he was only 10 years old and he began his “entrepreneurial journey” by teaching coding lessons for $30 an hour. On the side, he watched the film The Social Network, which teaches a thing or two about scaling up (besides other things that we will not get into).
He met Langmack at a coding camp and their first venture, Grind Clock (a motivational alarm clock app), garnered 20,000 downloads in its first two weeks.
There is plenty of competition in this space, like MyFitnessPal and SnapCalorie. Once again turning to TechCrunch, Cal AI uses models from Anthropic, OpenAI and RAG to improve accuracy and is trained on open-source food calorie and image databases from sites like GitHub.