Launched in May, Cal AI has generated over 5 million downloads in eight months, Yadegari says. Better still, he tells TechCrunch that the customer retention rate is over 30% and that the app generated over $2 million in revenue last month. Although TechCrunch couldn't validate his download and revenue claims, Cal AI does have a 4.8-star rating on the Apple App Store, with 66,000 reviews, and over 1 million downloads on Google Play with a 4.8-star rating on nearly 75,000 reviews. It's not a unique idea. For instance, the big dog in calorie counting, MyFitnessPal, has its Meal Scan feature. Then there are apps like SnapCalorie, which was released in 2023 and created by the founder of Google Lens. Cal AI's advantage, perhaps, is that it was built wholly in the age of large image models. It uses models from Anthropic and OpenAI and RAG to improve accuracy and is trained on open source food calorie and image databases from sites like GitHub. Yadegari built his first business in the ninth...
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