Anyone who's eaten out in the past few years has felt and maybe caved to the urge to snap a pic of a particularly well-plated or photogenic entrée for social media. But now, there might finally be a practical and legitimately constructive reason to photograph all those perfectly seared veggies, juicy burgers, or towering desserts with your phone. Former engineers at Google and defense contractor Raytheon have created a cellphone app that can count the calories in any meal by simply taking a photo. Its makers say SnapCalorie -- which is already available for download on Apple's App Store and on Google Play, for free, with a $29.00-per-month premium option -- is better at eyeballing the calorie content of a dish than'professional nutritionists.' 'Human beings are terrible at visually estimating the portion size of a plate of food,' according to SnapCalorie's co-founder, who hopes the app will find wide adoption among dieters too afraid to eat out in case they go over their calorie limit. SnapCalorie's founders say the app is better at eyeballing the calorie content in a dish than'professional nutritionists.' Their AI's secret is a special dataset, Nutrition5k, which the company produced by amassing nutritional data, photos and video of 5000 real-world meals One study compared the industry's leading AI-calorie counting apps to dismal results, finding that SnapCalorie's established rival, Calorie Mama, was only right about 63 percent of the time As of this month, Index Ventures, Y Combinator and even CrossFit CEO Eric Roza himself, have collectively invested a total of $2 million into the team's new start-up. The funders have apparently seen something in the company's co-founders, former Google AI engineer Wade Norris and ex-former Raytheon engineer Scott Baron, as well as their calorie-counting AI, Roboflow.