Cal AI founder raises $10M for new AI agent startup Persona

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

In March, MyFitnessPal acquired Cal AI for an undisclosed sum, after the app had pulled in over $30 million in annual revenue in under two years, MyFitnessPal told TechCrunch at the time. Yadegari and his co-founders initially stayed on to keep developing Cal AI under its new owner, but he left in June and went straight to work on Persona. He’s working with another co-founder who hasn’t been named yet.

Persona is a personal AI assistant similar to Instinct or Meta’s Muse, but with a hardware component: a $179 wearable band expected to be available in December. That makes it somewhat like Bee, the wearable AI device Amazon acquired in 2025, though Yadegari says Persona’s band differs in several ways — it won’t be “ambient,” meaning it won’t always be listening, and it activates via a button or a flick of the wrist instead.

Persona doesn’t run its AI model or store user data on the device; the model runs in Persona’s cloud, with data encrypted in transit and at rest, and users can delete their data, the company says. Yadegari says the team is also building in safeguards against phishing and prompt-injection attempts. The agent can’t see a user’s credit-card details, he says, and purchases require the user’s approval, with payment handled through providers like Stripe Link.

The startup’s current business model relies on ads shown during shopping research, even though user data isn’t sold to advertisers; Yadegari says the agent still shows unbiased recommendations because it doesn’t know which results are sponsored. Persona has launched as a free beta that works over iMessage, attracting a few thousand beta users so far, and the band has already generated five figures in preorder revenue, Yadegari said.

“All of the utility apps that you use on your phone day-to-day, whether those are apps for shopping, whether it’s Uber, DoorDash, your email — these are all collapsing and will collapse into a single super app powered by an AI assistant,” Yadegari said.

Why it matters

Persona’s quick, well-funded follow-on shows investors are still betting on consumer AI hardware from founders with a proven track record, even as the wearable-assistant category remains unproven at scale.