When it came to Cal AI’s viral success, a small army of influencers paid off

Zach Yadegari is barely out of high school, but his calorie-tracking app Cal AI has already had the kind of run most founders only talk about. The company was founded in 2024, rode a wave of influencer posts to viral attention, and said it pulled in more than $30 million in revenue in two years before MyFitness bought it in March for an undisclosed sum.

Speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt on Thursday, Yadegari said the growth playbook was brutally simple: pay a lot of influencers, get them posting fast, and keep doubling down on what converted. He said one early post drove about 1,000 new users in two days, which was enough to prove the model and turn the team into a recruiting machine for creators.

The pitch to influencers was practical, not romantic. Yadegari said the company negotiated payouts based on reach and told some creators to keep posting until they hit the agreed usage target. He described many of them as broke college kids who just wanted cash. The key, he said, was not fame for fame’s sake, but finding creators with tight communities whose reach could actually be measured.

Yadegari, who had his father in the audience, also credited his family for giving him room to chase ambitious ideas. And he made his view of college pretty plain: the main reason to go is for the social life.

That same appetite for speed is now showing up in Persona, the AI agent startup he launched earlier this month. It has already raised $10 million, and Yadegari says it is meant to make computing feel seamless with human life, with a personal assistant that can live anywhere there’s internet, from iMessage to email to phone calls.