UTRGV Team Named Finalist in Zoho’s First-Ever AI Hackathon
Edinburg, UTRGV, Zoho Corporation, From The Ground Up, Artificial Intelligence
Staff Report
Edinburg TX – A team from the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley has been named a finalist in Zoho Corporation’s first-ever AI hackathon, “From The Ground Up,” which challenges college students to design AI solutions addressing wildfire risk, water scarcity and agricultural instability in rural communities across California and Texas.
Team Dos Ojos, made up of UTRGV students and brothers Edgar Bello Gonzalez and Eduardo Bello Gonzalez, is developing an AI-driven crop-stress monitoring tool focused on agricultural sustainability. The tool pairs free Sentinel-2 satellite imagery with targeted drone flights to give small Rio Grande Valley farmers simple, bilingual text message guidance on where to direct scarce irrigation water during drought conditions, according to Zoho.
The brothers grew up in Mexico, where they experienced stretches without water that affected local harvests and farmers’ livelihoods, according to the company. Since relocating to the Rio Grande Valley, they said they have noticed similar recurring droughts and intend to use their engineering education to help their new community.
Team Dos Ojos is one of five finalist teams selected from a competition open to students at a preselected list of rural and rural-serving universities in California and Texas. The other finalist teams come from Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi (two teams), Austin Community College-Round Rock, and East Texas A&M University.
Teams of up to three students were asked to design an AI system or suite of lightweight, interoperable AI tools addressing wildfire risk, water scarcity or agricultural instability, with an emphasis on empowering rural communities without displacing local expertise, draining resources, or extracting data. Submission guidelines emphasized community sovereignty, appropriate scale, interoperability between environmental systems, equity of access, and honest accounting of the environmental footprint of the AI tools themselves.
Raju Vegesna, Zoho’s chief evangelist, said the competition reflects the company’s long-standing commitment to rural innovation. “For decades, one of Zoho’s guiding principles was the belief that world-class software can be built from anywhere, including rural communities,” Vegesna said. “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.”
The five finalist teams will receive mentorship from Zoho leaders and travel support to present a prototype and pitch deck to a panel of industry judges at a finalist event at Zoho’s office in Pleasanton, California, on Tuesday, Sept. 22. The winning team will receive a $15,000 prize.
Members of the public are encouraged to vote for their favorite finalist team, with public votes counting toward a portion of each team’s overall score. Voting is open through Sept. 22 at 9 a.m. Pacific time at zoho.to/ftgu-vote.
Zoho has an expanding presence in the Rio Grande Valley. The company purchased the historic Echo Hotel property in Edinburg in April 2025, with plans to redevelop the site into a modern office campus, and has acquired approximately 1,050 acres north of Edinburg for a broader technology campus. Zoho’s global headquarters is in Chennai, India, with its U.S. headquarters in Austin.
Source – Zoho Corporation