After deal talks that lasted nearly a year, MyFitnessPal has successfully acquired up-and-coming rival Cal AI.

Cal AI is an AI calorie counting app startup founded by two teenagers in high school which has grown to more than 15 million downloads and more than $30 million in annual revenue in less than two years, MyFitnessPal told TechCrunch.

The Cal AI team of seven employees, including its co-founder and CEO Zach Yadegari (pictured, above), and a small group of contractors, have been retained by MyFitnessPal (MFP), according to MyFitnessPal CEO Mike Fisher.

The Cal AI app will remain independent, with the same easy-to-use mission: estimate calories by taking photos of food. One upgrade for Cal AI users has already occurred since the deal closed in December: The AI ​​app is now integrated with MFP’s extensive nutrition database. That database covers 20 million foods, 68,500 brands, and meals served by 380+ restaurant chains.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed except that Fisher noted that since the Cal AI team does not need to be sold, they are happy with the offer. With that $30 million revenue figure, we can imagine that this is a good result for the now 19-year-old co-founders, Yadegari, and his high school friend Henry Langmack.

In fact, the deal required a lot of perseverance, Fisher said. Bigger companies noticed Cal AI as it began to climb app store rankings, visible through tools like Sensor Tower, he said.

“We’re looking at the entire competitor suite,” Fisher said, which, he said, includes about 70 competitors large and small. “They definitely caught our eye, I mean, early last year, and we’ve been talking to them ever since, before.”

What convinced Fisher and the team to pursue the acquisition wasn’t just watching Cal AI climb the app download charts (the two are neck and neck. at the highest rank in their category in Sensor Tower) – he was also impressed with the focus of the team run under its young CEO.

“They get a lot of media attention because they’re relatively young, and it’s easy to dismiss,” he said, “You talk to them, like I did in the late spring of last year, and you walk away saying this is an impressive young man.”

For example, Cal AI’s regular stand-up meeting takes place on Sunday evenings. Since the founders were still in school, Yadegari worked all week at his startup and his team was dedicated enough to join him on Sundays for a weekly check-in.

“So it’s little, little details like that, that when you put them together, you say, this is someone who’s not doing this as a hobby,” Fisher said. “They’re really serious about it.”

Fisher declined to specify how long the retention period for the founders and team would remain with MyFitnessPal after the acquisition. Four years is a fairly industry-standard term, often tied to payments, though again, he wouldn’t comment on it, even when pressed.

However, we learn that Yadegari is still running the app, now as an MFP unit, while in college. The young founder also went viral last year in X after he revealed that out of the 18 top colleges he applied to, even with a 4.0 GPA and a successful company, he was rejected by 15.

He told TechCrunch at the time that he had no intention of going to college and instead wants to focus on his company. But after a summer in a hacker house surrounded by a bunch of classic college dropouts in Silicon Valley made him see that his options would remain better than a college degree.

Fisher said MFP currently has no current plans to integrate the app into its main product, such as replacing MFP’s current photo-meal scan feature, or removing Cal AI users. He believes apps serve different markets.

Cal AI is for those who prefer speed over accuracy. MFP is for those who want to reverse. “We’re both doing meal scans, right? So, take a picture of your food, we’re both doing it,” said Fisher. But when MFP users take a picture of a hamburger, they can fine-tune the inputs to specify three pickles, not two. With Cal AI, “We realized there’s an audience of people who want it fast, they want AI-based. They want it to not interfere with their lives and not have to think about it.”