Zoho said on September 14 that five student teams had reached the finals of From the Ground Up, its first artificial intelligence hackathon for rural and rural-serving campuses in California and Texas. Teams of up to three students submitted written proposals. The five finalists get mentorship, travel support, and a day in Pleasanton on September 22 to show a prototype and a pitch deck. Judges pick the winner. Public votes on the Zoho form count as part of the score through 9 a.m. Pacific Time that morning. The winning team receives $15,000 (Zoho, 2026).
I opened the form and voted. Students built tools for drought, leaks, crops, and wells. Zoho put a check and a stage on that work.
Vote here
Voting is open through 9 a.m. PT on Tuesday, September 22.
The five tools rank cases, flag leaks, and send a short text
Team NoNiMo at Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi built BASIN. The tool takes public precipitation records and ranks drought what-if cases so Region N planners spend scarce hydrology money on the worst scenarios first. Zoho's write-up says the three computer science students, Noah Wilborn, Misha Stegall, and Mohammed Asad Khan, are working through the 2026 Corpus Christi water squeeze, and that the regional models still rest on 2015 hydrology (Zoho, 2026).
CoderOP, also at Texas A&M–Corpus Christi, is Maharshi Barot and Saumya Patel. Their tool reads nighttime flow logs and free satellite images, then writes a plain-language leak list with estimated gallons a day, cost, and location for utility crews who are not modelers.
Dos Ojos is brothers Edgar Bello Gonzalez and Eduardo Bello Gonzalez at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. They pair free Sentinel-2 satellite frames with a few drone flights and send bilingual short message service notes that tell a small farmer where to put scarce irrigation water.
Land Memory AI, from Kuralay Biehler and Lazzat Duiseshova at Austin Community College–Round Rock, lets a landowner keep photos, notes, and old records, then layer public environmental data on top for water and fire decisions. Irriga, from Jessica Parra Serena and Thi Xuan My Tran at East Texas A&M University, takes soil, well, and weather sensors the North Plains Groundwater Conservation District already runs across eight Panhandle counties and turns that feed into irrigation advice that still works offline. The first pilot is Moore County and the Ogallala Aquifer (Zoho, 2026).
California schools were eligible. Every finalist team is in Texas.
They rank drought cases, flag leaks, and send irrigation notes to the people a county already pays to do that work.
The work is analysis and prediction on records a county already keeps
I have been calling this analytical and predictive work for years. Rank the next drought case from rain data. Predict which pipe is losing treated water at night. Score crop stress from a satellite pass. Advise an irrigation set from sensors that sit in the ground.
I used that split last week when Cloudera put Mistral models next to governed records. The job there was loan files and plant runs (Cloudera Puts Mistral Models on 30 Exabytes of Customer Data). Here the job is a well, a leak, or a field.
September 22 is a pitch day. After the prize, the test is whether a water district uses the worklist.
Zoho has argued for rural building for more than a decade
Raju Vegesna, Zoho's chief evangelist, tied the hackathon to an office the company has kept in Tenkasi, India, and to hiring in Texas's Rio Grande Valley. He said world-class software can be built from anywhere (Zoho, 2026). I have watched that line since Zoho Day earlier this year, when the company talked about small and medium models and its own Zia stack rather than renting every inference call (Zoho Day 2026: The Counter-Narrative to AI Hype).
The press note names the five teams and the brief. It does not require Zia and it does not name Sridhar Vembu. Zoho limited the pool to rural and rural-serving campuses in the two states where it has U.S. offices, paid for travel, and left a slice of the score to anyone who reads the five descriptions.
Sources
Zoho Corporation. "Zoho Announces Finalists for From The Ground Up, Its First-Ever AI Hackathon Featuring College Student-Built AI Solutions to Rural Environmental Crises." 14 Sep. 2026, www.zoho.com/news/zoho-announces-finalists-from-the-ground-up-first-ever-ai-hackathon-college-student-built-ai-solutions-rural-environmental-crises.html.
Zoho Corporation. From the Ground Up public voting form. zoho.to/ftgu-vote.
Bellamkonda, Shashi. "Cloudera Puts Mistral Models on 30 Exabytes of Customer Data." shashi.co, 11 Sep. 2026, www.shashi.co/2026/09/cloudera-puts-mistral-models-on-30.html.
Bellamkonda, Shashi. "Zoho Day 2026: The Counter-Narrative to AI Hype." shashi.co, 12 Feb. 2026, www.shashi.co/2026/02/zoho-day-2026-counter-narrative-to-ai.html.
