Zoho Announces Finalists for From The Ground Up, Its First-Ever AI Hackathon Featuring College Student-Built AI Solutions to Rural Environmental Crises

Zoho Announces Finalists for From The Ground Up, Its First-Ever AI Hackathon Featuring College Student-Built AI Solutions to Rural Environmental Crises

• Competition continues Zoho's longstanding efforts toward a technology-enabled rural revival
• Hackathon submissions originated from students enrolled in universities from historically underserved parts of California and Texas
• Projects focus on AI systems that address growing risks of wildfires, water scarcity or agricultural instability

AUSTIN, Texas - September 14, 2026 - Zoho Corporation, a global technology company, today announced the five teams that have reached the finals in From The Ground Up, Zoho's first-ever AI hackathon that addresses problems such as wildfire risk, water scarcity and agricultural instability in areas of California and Texas. The competition, which was open to students currently enrolled at a preselected list of rural and rural-serving universities where traditional AI resources and funding are often scarce, continues Zoho's efforts toward a technology-enabled rural revival.

"For decades, one of Zoho's guiding principles was the belief that world-class software can be built from anywhere, including rural communities. It's the reason why we've had an office in a rural village in Tenkasi, India for over a decade, and why we continue to discover new talent in Texas's Rio Grande Valley," says Raju Vegesna, Zoho's Chief Evangelist. "We have long heard vague suggestions towards the transformative potential of AI to solve global problems from Silicon Valley CEOs, but by providing tools and financial support to dedicated students from rural communities, From The Ground Up puts them into action, while continuing Zoho's longstanding commitment to supporting the places beyond our major cities."

AI technology is often cited as a revolutionary tool to address modern societal problems, yet these tools are often developed in labs far away from the communities that need it most, and are often too expensive for anyone but the largest players to implement. From The Ground Up was created to help support those with first-hand knowledge of the issues facing rural communities, as Zoho believes that the best AI solutions for these areas are built within them, not handed down to them.

Teams of up to three students were asked to design an AI system or suite of lightweight, interoperable AI tools that address the crises of wildfire risk, water scarcity, or agricultural instability, focusing on empowering rural communities and indigenous tribes without displacing their expertise, draining their resources, or extracting their data. Team members were required to be currently enrolled at an eligible university, selected by Zoho based on the Hackathon's focus on rural and rural-serving California and Texas communities - states experiencing growing problems with wildfires, water resources, and agricultural sustainability, and where Zoho has a physical presence.

Applicants were asked to design their projects according to the following concerns:

• Community sovereignty: Indigenous communities and rural farmers should be genuine partners in design, not just end users or data sources. Solutions should be tools that communities wield on their own terms.
• Appropriate scale: Teams should prioritize small, purpose-trained, locally-run models over large general-purpose systems wherever the task allows. Edge deployment on modest hardware (e.g., solar-powered sensors in fields or tribal territories) is preferable to cloud-dependent queries.
• Interoperability: Wildfire risk, water availability, and agricultural decisions are not separate - contestants' tools should reflect that. For example, soil moisture data should inform both irrigation scheduling and cultural burn timing. Groundwater modeling should connect to crop viability planning.
• Equity of access: The communities with the most to gain are often those with the fewest resources. Solutions should be low-cost to adopt, usable with limited connectivity, and designed for operators without data science staff.
• Honest environmental accounting: Account for the computational and water footprint of the AI tools themselves. Prefer lean, efficient deployments and justify any heavier computation by the scale of the benefit.

Applicants submitted a written proposal, five of which were selected to be finalists. The five finalist teams will receive mentorship from Zoho leaders and travel support, presenting a prototype and pitch deck to a judging panel of industry leaders at the finalist event, to be held at Zoho's office in Pleasanton, California on Tuesday, September 22nd, 2026. The winning team, selected at the event, will win a $15,000 prize.

The five finalists:

Students: Noah Wilborn, Misha Stegall, and Mohammed Asad Khan

School: Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi

Core Topic Addressed: Water Resource Management

Solution: BASIN is a locally run, transparent AI tool that generates and ranks auditable drought "what-if" scenarios from public precipitation data, helping Region N planners, hydrologists, and rural water providers prioritize which worsening drought conditions deserve costly formal hydrologic modeling. Team NoMiMo is made up of computer science students at TAMUCC who are currently experiencing the 2026 water crisis in Corpus Christi, TX, which is on track to become the first city in the United States to run out of water. The region's water supply models rely on outdated hydrology data from 2015, yet updating these models for every new emergency scenario would require costly hydrologist consulting, a price tag that remains out of the community's budget.

Students: Kuralay Biehler and Lazzat Duiseshova

School: Austin Community College-Round Rock

Core Topic(s) Addressed: Water Resource Management, Wildfire & Land Stewardship, Agricultural Sustainability

Solution: Land Memory AI is a mobile/web tool that helps Texas farmers and rural landowners combine their personal land knowledge-historical records, photos, and observations-with environmental data to make more informed land, water, and wildfire-preparedness decisions, without replacing their judgment. Team Land Memory AI has combined academic and personal experience across farming, research, law, design, and business administration, which grounds their approach in real-world organizational and practical considerations.

Students: Edgar Bello Gonzalez and Eduardo Bello Gonzalez

School: University of Texas Rio Grande Valley

Core Topic(s) Addressed: Agricultural Sustainability

Solution: Dos Ojos is an AI-driven crop-stress monitoring tool that pairs free Sentinel-2 satellite imagery with targeted drone flights to give small Rio Grande Valley farmers simple, bilingual SMS guidance on where to direct scarce irrigation water during drought, helping them stay in business despite harsh climate conditions. Team Dos Ojos is comprised of Edgar and Eduardo Bello Gonzalez, brothers who grew up in Mexico, experiencing stretches where their city had no water, affecting local harvests and the livelihoods of farmers. Since relocating to the Rio Grande Valley, they have noticed similar recurring droughts, and intend to use their engineering education to help their new community.

Students: Maharshi Barot and Saumya Patel

School: Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi

Core Topic(s) Addressed: Water Resource Management

Solution: Coder OP is building an AI tool that uses nighttime flow logs and free satellite imagery to flag likely leak zones for rural, under-resourced Texas utilities, converting that into a plain-language worklist with estimated gallons/day lost, cost, and location so non-technical staff can recover more already-treated water during the ongoing drought. As graduate students living through the drought crisis in Corpus Christi, Maharshi and Saumya watched as the conversation turned to the city's infrastructure, and were inspired to create a solution.

Students: Jessica Parra Serena and Thi Xuan My Tran

School: East Texas A&M University

Core Topic(s) Addressed: Water Resource Management

Solution: Team Irriga is developing an AI advisor that uses existing soil, well, and weather sensor data from NPGCD, spanning eight counties across the northern Texas Panhandle, to give small farmers access to quality irrigation advice both online and offline, helping them cut water use and slow the Ogallala Aquifer's decline without expensive one-on-one mentorship. The team's pilot program is currently focused on Moore County, with plans to expand further across the Panhandle in the future. Team Irriga became invested the Ogallala Aquifer upon learning just how significantly its water level has declined since large-scale pumping began decades ago, and the massive gap between the amount of groundwater data collected by the NPGCD and how little of that data reaches local farmers.

How the public can participate:

Members of the public are encouraged to vote for their favorite of the five From The Ground Up finalists. The winner of this year's hackathon will be determined by a team of judges on September 22nd, where public votes will count for a portion of each team's overall score during the finalist event. Voting is open now through September 22nd at 9 AM PT.

To vote, visit https://zoho.to/ftgu-vote.

About Zoho Corporation

With 55+ apps in nearly every major business category, Zoho Corporation is one of the world's most prolific technology companies. Zoho's global headquarters is in Chennai, India, with its U.S. headquarters in Austin, Texas. Zoho is privately held and profitable, with 90+ offices across 28 countries and more than 19,000 employees worldwide. For more information, visit www.zoho.com.

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