How I Built A $1.4 Million/Month AI App At Age 18

To be 18 and have a Lamborghini. Honestly, it feels kind of awesome. I think a lot of people will use age as something that is a self-limiting belief, but I didn't buy into any of that. When I've wanted to do something, I will just go and do it. This has helped me with learning to code at such an early age, getting into entrepreneurship at such an early age, and then anything else along the way. My name is Zach Yadegari. I'm 18 years old and the co-founder and CEO of Cal AI, an app where you can just take a picture of your food and then it will automatically calculate the calories and macros for you. My app brings in about $1.4 million a month after the app stores cut. We reinvest most of the money back into the app from Cal AI. But whenever there's enough cash left over, we will pay out dividends to ourselves. Most recently, I personally was paid $100,000 from dividends. Most of the money I've made from the app so far I've actually spent. I recently bought a Lamborghini, which, you know, some will say it's an irresponsible thing to buy at my age. But I think that it's always something I've dreamed of getting, and it's only going to have diminishing returns as I get older. I'm not that materialistic. I don't have many things that I plan to buy past that, and therefore I'm probably going to just start saving. A few years ago I started working out. I was a really skinny kid growing up and I wanted to put on muscle. Honestly, to impress girls at my school. So I started going to the gym, weightlifting and didn't really see any results. And so after getting some advice from someone at the gym, I downloaded one of the most popular apps at the time. I started using it and three days in I quit. And that's because the app required me to weigh my food on a scale, type in everything I was eating. It was unsustainable for my lifestyle. Fast forward about a year or two, and ChatGPT and all these other AI technologies started releasing. And so, along with my co-founders, we hypothesized that we could build an app where you could just take a picture and the AI will do all the work for you. And we launched it. The response immediately was very positive. That's when we knew we had something good on our hands and we decided to go all in. And so, along with Henry, my CTO, we decided let's spend the summer doing everything we can to make this app actually succeed. And so we moved to San Francisco for the month of July. We stayed there for a month, lived in a hacker house, basically slept in the office, and I think that month was the real turning point. That's when we started making our first real hires, started building up a team, and got into a really good rhythm that would carry us throughout the next year. I have three co-founders with Cal AI. It was a lot juggling high school and running Cal AI at the same time. In the past, all of the projects I had been working on were always side projects to me. I would put school first. If I had a test to study for, I would study for the test and then I would work on the app. But Cal AI, for the first time I would prioritize. I would put in on average 40 hours a week into Cal AI on top of school, often working while in school. Took my APs this week. AP tests. Sat for 12 hours total doing nothing, I don't care. There are more important things to discuss. Basically, I didn't even take my AP tests. I didn't think I was going to go to college at this point, so I just sat there and didn't take a single one. Our special sauce at Cal AI, what we really do right is influencer marketing, and that's where a far majority of our spending goes to. We have many competitors. These apps are the reason that we started Cal AI. It's because they suck. There are many misconceptions about Cal AI and what AI can do. Some of our users expect it to have x ray vision, where if you take a picture of a bowl of food and you hid things at the bottom of the bowl, it's going to pick it up. It won't. You have to make sure every ingredient is clearly in frame, and we try to teach the users early on in the app's tutorial how to use the scanner the most effectively. All refunds are handled by Apple directly. We don't process payments ourselves within the app, and that's a common misconception of many users, is they think the app actually handles payments and takes in credit card info, but they don't, Apple does. So you have to directly request a refund with them. I started learning to code when I was seven years old. I was obsessed with video games like Minecraft and Roblox, and so I begged my mom to put me in a summer camp to teach me how to make my own. There were many different factors that drove me to be an entrepreneur at such a young age. The biggest was that I always felt like I was pushed down a very narrow path in the school system, because I want to get a good grade on this test so that I could get into a good college, so that I could get a good job so that I could make money. And then I decided if I could skip all of those steps and just make money, then I wouldn't be stressed anymore. My freshman year of high school, I built an unblocked gaming website that lets students play games in school, bypassing the internet blocking protocols. Building Cal AI was very inexpensive because I programed it along with Henry. It was only when we launched to the public that we really spent money. Scaling the business took everything I made from Totally Science, and then Blake doubled that on top of it. Because of Apple's payout calendar. They pay you about 45 days after you make a sale. And so because of that, we were scaling faster than Apple was paying us, which meant that for months we were putting money in and we weren't seeing a proportional amount of money out. It took about six months before we were finally ahead of Apple's payout schedule, and we were making more than we were paying. And this sounds a little confusing. It sounds like maybe we weren't profitable. We were very profitable during that time. I decided to go to college because I could just go into the business world, start working full time, get an in-person office with the team, and that could be cool. And that is something I do want to do. However, before that, I want to hold on to a little bit of this childhood experience of going to college, making new friends, having a good social life of peers that are also 18 years old. I'm getting a house with a bunch of other app founders that's right next to campus, and we're going to call this house the App Mafia. We're going to be recording a ton of content, throwing parties, educating people, teaching them how they can build their own apps. I'm going to be living this dual life between entrepreneurship and just student life and balancing that. It's going to be probably fun, but also pretty difficult. My only concern is that I'm not going to want to do any college work whatsoever. And if that becomes something where I just never do anything, I don't know how long I'll last there before they kick me out. It's something I've thought a lot about is the end goal for Cal AI. For the longest time, it's always been become the biggest calorie tracking app. When we are helping people on autopilot is when I would consider the job really complete. After Cal AI, I plan to build a generational company. Not sure entirely what yet, but while this company is helping many people, I want to build something that can push that even further. I think entrepreneurship is really cool because at the end of the day, age doesn't really matter much. You're either good or not good at what you do, and then the market will decide the rest.

Zach Yadegari, 18, is the co-founder and CEO of Cal AI, a calorie-tracking mobile app that uses AI to analyze photos of food. The app launched in May 2024 and has been downloaded 8.3 million times as of July 2025. Now, Cal AI is a 30-person company that brings in roughly $1.4 million in gross profit per month — after the Apple and Google Play app stores take their respective cuts — according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It. Produced & Shot by: Valentina Duarte Senior Director of Video: Jessica Leibowitz Additional Camera: Natalie Rice Editor: Dennis Donovan Animator: Alisa Stern Senior Production Manager: Kathryn Mavrikakis Additional Footage: Zach Yadegari, Getty Images Subscribe to CNBC Make It.: http://cnb.cx/2kxl2rf Watch CNBC on the go with CNBC+: https://www.cnbc.com/WatchCNBCPlus Want to stand out, grow your network, and get more job opportunities? Sign up for Smarter by CNBC Make It's new online course, How to Build a Standout Personal Brand: Online, In Person, and At Work. Sign up today: https://cnb.cx/4nZtNrX About CNBC Make It.: CNBC Make It. is a new section of CNBC dedicated to making you smarter about managing your business, career, and money. Connect with CNBC Make It Online Get the latest updates: https://www.cnbc.com/make-it Find CNBC Make It on Instagram: https://bit.ly/InstagramCNBCMakeIt Find CNBC Make It on Facebook: https://cnb.cx/LikeCNBCMakeIt Find CNBC Make It on threads: https://cnb.cx/threadsCNBCMakeIt Find CNBC Make It on X: https://cnb.cx/FollowCNBCMakeIt #CNBC #CNBCMakeIt #howimadeit How I Built A $1.4 Million/Month AI App At Age 18