Zach Yadegari, the Miami-based 19-year-old behind Cal AI, raised $10 million for Persona, an AI assistant with a $179 wearable band. Vine Ventures led. #Startups #AIAgents #Wearables
Zach Yadegari, the 19-year-old founder behind Cal AI, has raised $10 million for a new AI startup called Persona.
Yadegari is based in Miami, Business Insider reports. Vine Ventures led the round, and Z Fellows founder Cory Levy and Collective Global took part, TechCrunch reports.
What Is Persona?
Persona is a personal AI assistant, similar to Instinct or Meta’s Muse, with a hardware component. A $179 wearable band is expected in December.
MAIN covered Instinct when it raised $350 million, in an AI assistant raising $350M despite privacy backlash.
Persona’s band differs from ambient devices such as Bee, which Amazon acquired in 2025. It will not always listen or record. A button activates the assistant, and users can also set it to wake with a flick of the wrist.
For now, Persona runs as a free beta over iMessage. It has “a few thousand beta users,” Yadegari told TechCrunch. The band has already generated “five figures in preorder revenue,” he said. Like other consumer assistants, Persona can order food or rides, take notes, book travel and answer emails.
How Does Persona Handle Privacy and Money?
The model does not run on the device. It runs in Persona’s cloud, and user data is sent there. Persona says it encrypts data in transit and at rest, and users can delete their data. Yadegari says conversations cannot be sold to advertisers or data brokers, and the team is building safeguards against phishing and prompt injection.
On payments, Yadegari says the agent cannot see a user’s credit-card details. Purchases require the user’s approval and run through external providers such as Stripe Link, Stripe’s wallet for agents.
The business model relies on advertising rather than selling user data. The company will show advertised products during shopping research — his example is office chairs, where the agent knows a user’s preferences and shows matching chairs, some of them sponsored. Yadegari says the agent will not know which items are advertised, so its recommendations stay unbiased.
Yadegari has a broader thesis: he says utility apps such as shopping, Uber, DoorDash and email “are all collapsing and will collapse into a single super app powered by an AI assistant.”
What Did He Build Before Persona?
Cal AI is an AI calorie-tracking app Yadegari co-founded while in high school. It launched in May 2024, reached 10 million users and $30 million in annual revenue, Business Insider reports, before MyFitnessPal acquired it for an undisclosed sum.
Yadegari first worked for MyFitnessPal. He left in June, he told TechCrunch, and began work on Persona with another co-founder who has yet to be announced. His first business was Totally Science, an unblocked games website for students, which he sold for $100,000 when he was 16.
The Cal AI sale came down to priorities, he told Business Insider. “We want the legacy of Cal AI to live forever and continue to grow,” he said. “At the same time, my life’s mission isn’t building a calorie tracking app.”
After the sale, Yadegari assembled a team for Flow, a brand for productivity and health products. Its first product, the Flow Alarm Clock, released in March, requires users to tap their phone on a dock to turn off the alarm, and it blocks chosen apps until then and tracks sleep patterns. “I sometimes wake up, and I scroll on my phone for 30 minutes,” Yadegari said.
Hardware has risks, and he named them. “The elephant in the room is that we have to ship physical products and manufacture them,” he said. Yadegari speaks at TechCrunch Disrupt on October 13-15 in San Francisco, on how to create viral growth and capitalize on it.
MAIN has looked at what Miami founders say holds the ecosystem back in Miami Startup Hub: What Founders Say Holds It Back. A Miami teenager sold one company and is already raising money for the next.
Sources:
- TechCrunch: Cal AI’s 19-year-old founder just raised $10M for his new AI startup, Julie Bort
- Business Insider: Why this teen founder walked away from his multimillion-dollar company, Lauren Edmonds
- MAIN: AI assistant Instinct raises $350M despite privacy backlash
- MAIN: Miami Startup Hub: What Founders Say Holds It Back
