Teen Who Built a $30M Calorie App Now Wants to Fix Your Mornings

Zach Yadegari, a 19-year-old Miami-based entrepreneur, sold Cal AI — an AI-powered calorie-tracking app he co-founded in high school — to MyFitnessPal late last year. The app launched in May 2024, quickly scaled to 10 million users, and hit $30 million in annual recurring revenue before the acquisition. Yadegari framed the sale as a values-alignment decision among the co-founders: everyone mapped out their personal priorities, and the consensus pointed toward an exit. For Yadegari specifically, that meant cashing in financial freedom while acknowledging that calorie tracking wasn't his life's purpose.

This wasn't Yadegari's first exit. At 16, he sold Totally Science — an "unblocked" website that let students sneak past school internet filters to play games — for $100,000. That early win helped establish his reputation as a serial builder well before college.

His next chapter is Flow, a brand designed as a suite of health and productivity products. The first release, the Flow Alarm Clock, launched in March and targets a very specific problem: people who mindlessly scroll their phones for 30 minutes after waking up. The system requires buying a small physical dock placed somewhere in the home, plus downloading the Flow app. When the alarm sounds, users must physically walk to the dock and tap their phone on it to silence the alarm — that same tap also unblocks pre-selected apps. The device also tracks sleep patterns and records sleep sounds.

The hardware pivot is deliberate but comes with new operational complexity. Yadegari is candid about the challenges: manufacturing, managing physical inventory, and navigating supply chain and shipping delays are a different beast than pure software. Still, he sees the macro tailwinds as compelling — the global wellness economy hit $6.8 trillion in 2024 and is projected to reach $9.8 trillion by 2029, according to the Global Wellness Institute. Yadegari is betting that a physical product in the health-productivity space, built quickly and solving a personal pain point, is a natural next move.