# Zoho awards $15,000 to student team for rural AI crop tool

Digest AI · Marketing & Small Business · published 2026-10-01T10:30:36Z

Canonical: https://digestai.news/story/zoho-awards-15-000-to-student-team-for-rural-ai-crop-tool

## Summary

Team Dos Ojos, consisting of brothers Edgar and Eduardo Bello Gonzalez from the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, won Zoho Corporation’s first AI hackathon on September 22. The team received a $15,000 prize for developing a crop-stress tool designed for small farmers in the Rio Grande Valley. The system combines free Sentinel-2 satellite imagery with targeted drone flights to send bilingual SMS guidance on irrigation during droughts, avoiding the need for dashboards or subscriptions.

The competition, titled "From The Ground Up," was limited to students at rural-serving universities in California and Texas. Four other finalist teams from Texas presented prototypes addressing wildfire risk, water scarcity, and agricultural instability. These included tools for drought scenario ranking, water leak detection, irrigation advising, and land memory integration. All teams focused on small, purpose-trained models running on modest hardware to ensure accessibility in areas with limited connectivity and technical staff.

Raju Vegesna, Zoho’s chief evangelist, stated the event aimed to counter vague industry claims by supporting practical, locally relevant AI solutions. Zoho, a privately held company with over 19,000 employees, emphasized that useful software often emerges from proximity to the problem rather than from large headquarters. The judge noted that the winning projects succeeded by understanding specific user needs and delivering solutions where users already were, such as via text messages, rather than through complex platforms.

## Key points

- Team Dos Ojos won Zoho's first AI hackathon with a $15,000 prize for a crop-stress tool.
- The tool uses satellite imagery and drone flights to send bilingual SMS irrigation guidance.
- Five finalist teams from Texas built low-cost, local AI tools for rural water and farm issues.

## Why it matters

This highlights a shift toward lightweight, locally deployed AI solutions for rural and small business contexts, prioritizing practical utility and low cost over large-scale general-purpose models.

## Sources

1. [Rural Students Just Built the AI Most Small Businesses Actually Need](https://smallbiztrends.com/rural-students-just-built-the-ai-most-small-businesses-actually-need) (Small Business Trends, 2026-10-01)

## Cite

Digest AI, "Zoho awards $15,000 to student team for rural AI crop tool", 1 October 2026, https://digestai.news/story/zoho-awards-15-000-to-student-team-for-rural-ai-crop-tool

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