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

Zach Yadegari, the teen co-founder of calorie tracking app Cal AI, has launched Persona, a new AI agent startup, and already raised $10 million. Vine Ventures led the round, with Z Fellows founder Cory Levy and Collective Global participating.

In March, MyFitnessPal acquired Cal AI for an undisclosed sum after it zoomed ahead of the older calorie app in the app store rankings. The deal was big enough to convince Yadegari and his co-founders to sell the company after it had pulled in over $30 million in annual revenue in under two years, MyFitnessPal told TechCrunch at the time.

Yadegari and his co-founders originally went to work for their new owner, continuing development on Cal AI, but he left the bigger company in June, he tells TechCrunch. He then went right to work on his next idea. (He is working with another co-founder who has yet to be announced.)

That idea is Persona, a personal AI assistant similar to Instinct or Meta’s Muse but with a hardware component that will soon be available: a $179 wearable band.

That makes Persona somewhat more like Bee, the wearable AI device that Amazon acquired in 2025, but Persona’s device differs in several ways, Yadegari tells TechCrunch. For one, it won’t be ambient AI, meaning it won’t always be listening and recording. The band will have a button that activates the assistant, or it can be set up to activate with the flick of one’s wrist.

Yadegari also says that Persona is designed with user privacy in mind. Persona doesn’t run its AI model or store user data on the device. Instead, the model runs in Persona’s cloud, and user data is sent there. The assistant protects privacy by encrypting data in transit and at rest. Users can also delete their data, the company says.

In this way, it is promising that user conversations stay private and cannot be sold to advertisers or data brokers.

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