Rudrojas had a rough couple of weeks as he did not know how to say ‘no’ to a $300,000 offer. “That’s a lot of money,” he said to Business Insider as he recounted how he built an AI tool to help farmers analyze crop health and why he did not want the tool to become unavailable to farmers for whom he built it. A venture capitalist last year offered him that shocking amount of money to drop out of high school and run his AI startup full-time. Indian-origin Rudrojas Kunvar is all of 16 years old, and he gathered the courage to say ‘no’ to the lucrative offer because he did not want his product to get wrapped in chasing benefits. His platform Evion is free and he has now partnered with 18-year-old Jacob Lee to expand the reach of his tool. His tool can help farmers analyze crop health by uploading photos of their camera, even a cheap drone camera.
Farmers said they were mostly guessing: Kunvar on how he got the idea
Kunvar said he attended a community festival in Montgomery County during his sophomore year at Poolesville High School. He asked a farmer how they understand when a plant is getting infected. “Essentially, he said he’s guessing. I spoke to a few other farmers, and I realized there was a common thread among all of their responses,” he said, explaining his shock when he realized that AI advancements are not doing much for agriculture. Kunvar wanted to make his own fleet of fully autonomous drones but then shifted his focus to studying drones and what drove the cost. It was the camera that made drones costly and so he thought what if there’s a way to get similar data using a simple camera. Evion uses AI to examine photos from basic drones, looking at both the color and reflection of the plants captured. The AI then returns a color-coded crop health map. Green means healthy, orange is moderate and red signals stressed crops. The tool has already reached more than 2,000 farmers across Asia and the US, they said.
