LI teen tech whiz Zach Yadegari — creator of $30M health app — makes college decision after all 8 Ivy League schools rejected him

New York Post

08-05-2025

This Long Island genius is taking his talents to Florida.
Tech whiz Zach Yadegari, 18, who boasts an impressive 4.0 GPA and 34 ACT score, committed to the University of Miami on April 30 after he was rejected from 15 of the 18 schools he applied to, including every Ivy League institution.
'Update: I officially committed to Umiami,' Yadegari wrote to his 45,300 followers on X.
Advertisement
Yadegari, of Rosslyn, NY, is a tech developer and has made over $30 million before setting foot on a college campus due to his AI-calorie counting app, Cal AI.
4 Long Island native and tech founder Zach Yadegari announced his commitment to the University of Miami on April 30, 2025.
Courtesy of Zach Yadegari
The program, which launched in 2024, allows users to track their daily calorie intake by snapping photos of their food.
Advertisement
The future Hurricane experienced a turbulent application process despite massive success with his grades and business venture.
In March, Yadegari revealed that he received rejection letters from all eight Ivy League schools plus MIT, Stanford, Washington University, Duke, USC, the University of Virginia, NYU and Vanderbilt.
4 The University of Miami's campus in Coral Gables, Florida on Oct. 16, 2024.
Felix Mizioznikov – stock.adobe.com
4 Zach Yadegari shared a list of the 15 schools that rejected him despite his grades and business success.
Advertisement
According to the tech whiz, he may not have fit into what universities were looking for in potential students.
'I think that college admissions tries to place students in this rubric, a very tight box, that makes it difficult for students with achievements outside of school, like an entrepreneur, to really stand out,' he told Fox News.
Yadegari said he wanted to go to college because he missed out on 'a lot of social events' in recent years.
Advertisement
'I'm 18, I want to hang out with other 18-year-olds. I don't want to go straight into the business world, just yet,' he added.
The University of Miami, Georgia Tech and the University of Texas were the only schools to accept his application.
'I didn't expect to be accepted to all of these colleges, however, I did expect to at least be accepted to a couple of the top schools I was applying to,' Yadegari told The Post in April. 'I think that entrepreneurial accomplishments may not be fully appreciated.'
The teen, who has been coding since he was 7 and had his first project on Apple's App Store when he was 12, said he only began to feel the weight of his situation after he was rejected from Stanford.
'I held out hope for Stanford, but then when I opened their rejection letter, all of the prior rejections just flooded in and really hit me at once,' Yadegari previously told The Post.
Not letting the mental anguish get to him, Yadegari compared his life to other successful entrepreneurs who didn't need higher education.
4 Zach Yadegari's personal essay published to X after revealing the 15 colleges that rejected him.
Advertisement
'In my rejection of the collegiate path, I had unwittingly bound myself to another framework of expectations: the archetypal dropout founder. Instead of schoolteachers, it was VCs and mentors steering me toward a direction that was still not my own,' he wrote in a personal essay.
'College, I came to realize, is more than a mere right of passage. It is the conduit to elevate the work I have always done. In this next chapter, I want to learn from humans – both professors and students – not just from computers or textbooks,' he added.