Ruud Rojas had a tough few weeks because he didn’t know how to say “no” to the $300,000 offer. “It’s a lot of money,” he told Business Insider about how he built an AI tool to help farmers analyze crop health and why he didn’t want the farmers he built for to be unable to use the tool. Last year, a venture capitalist gave him a staggering amount of money to drop out of high school and run his artificial intelligence startup full-time. At just 16 years old, Indian-born Rudrojas Kunvar found the courage to say “no” to a lucrative offer because he didn’t want his product to be mired in a profit-seeking situation. His platform, Evion, is free, and he’s now teaming up with 18-year-old Jacob Lee to expand the reach of his tool. His tool helps farmers analyze crop health by uploading photos from cameras, even cheap drone cameras.
Farmers said they were mostly left speculating: how Kunwar came up with the idea
Kunval said he attended a community festival in Montgomery County during his sophomore year at Poolesville High School. He asked one farmer how they knew when a plant was infected. “He said he was basically guessing. I talked to some other farmers, and I realized there was one common thread in all of their responses,” he said, explaining his shock when he realized advances in artificial intelligence wouldn’t do much for agriculture. Kunvar wanted to build his own fleet of fully autonomous drones, but he later turned his attention to studying drones and what drives cost. It’s the cameras that make drones expensive, so he wondered if there was a way to get similar data using a simple camera. Evion uses artificial intelligence to examine photos taken by a basic drone, looking at the colors and reflections of captured plants. The AI then returns a color-coded map of crop health. Green indicates healthy, orange indicates medium, and red indicates the crop is stressed. They say the tool has reached more than 2,000 farmers in Asia and the United States.
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