Cal AI’s 19-year-old founder just raised $10M for his new AI startup

Zach Yadegari is moving fast again. After co-founding Cal AI, the calorie-tracking app that MyFitnessPal bought in March, he has launched a new company called Persona and already closed a $10 million round. Vine Ventures led the deal, with Z Fellows founder Cory Levy and Collective Global also taking part.

Cal AI’s exit gave Yadegari a real runway. MyFitnessPal said at the time that the app had passed the older calorie counter in the app store rankings and was bringing in more than $30 million in annual revenue in under two years. Yadegari and his co-founders initially stayed on to keep building under the new owner, but he left in June and says he went straight into the new startup.

Persona is aiming at the same broad consumer AI space as products like Instinct and Meta’s Muse, but with a wearable attached. A $179 band is coming soon, and the company says it should be available in December. There’s also a free beta today, and that version runs through iMessage text messages. Yadegari says the service has already pulled in a few thousand beta users, while the band has generated five figures in preorder revenue.

The company is selling privacy as part of the pitch. Persona is not ambient, so it won’t be listening all the time. A button wakes it up, or users can flick their wrist. The model runs in the cloud rather than on the device, but the company says it encrypts data in transit and at rest, lets users delete their data, and won’t sell conversations to advertisers or data brokers. It also says the assistant is being built with defenses against phishing and prompt-injection attacks, and that it can’t see credit-card details. Purchases need user approval and go through external payment providers such as Stripe Link.

And yet the business model still includes ads. Persona plans to show sponsored items during shopping research, though Yadegari says the assistant won’t know which results are paid. The bigger ambition is even more aggressive: a personal AI that folds shopping, rides, email, food ordering and travel into one super app, then gets proactive before the user even notices a problem. That is a very Silicon Valley promise, minus the usual fake humility.