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By Dayna Reyes, Reporter

RIO GRANDE VALLEY, Texas — Two brothers and engineering students from the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV) have emerged as top national contenders in global software provider Zoho Corporation’s inaugural From The Ground Up AI Hackathon.

Brothers Edgar and Eduardo Bello Gonzalez, competing as Team Dos Ojos, have been named among five finalist teams across Texas and California selected to pitch their AI-driven agricultural solutions at Zoho’s regional headquarters in Pleasanton, California, on Tuesday, September 22, 2026. The winning team will receive a $15,000 top prize.

Zoho’s From The Ground Up competition was designed specifically to engage students from rural and rural-serving universities—institutions historically operating outside major Silicon Valley technology hubs—to develop practical, low-cost artificial intelligence systems addressing urgent regional environmental crises, including agricultural instability, severe water scarcity, and wildfire management.

Bridging Engineering and Borderland Realities

For Edgar and Eduardo Bello Gonzalez, the drive to build artificial intelligence tools for agricultural sustainability stems directly from personal experience on both sides of the Rio Grande.

Having grown up in Mexico, the brothers experienced firsthand prolonged municipal water shutoffs that crippled local harvests and devastated farming families. After relocating to South Texas and pursuing their degrees at UTRGV, they witnessed the Rio Grande Valley encountering similar recurring drought conditions and intense pressures on irrigation supplies.

That shared background inspired the creation of Dos Ojos, an AI-driven crop-stress monitoring system designed to protect small-scale Rio Grande Valley producers facing severe water restrictions.

The system pairs free, open-access Sentinel-2 satellite imagery with targeted, autonomous drone flights to provide small farmers with simplified, bilingual SMS guidance delivered directly to their mobile phones. By pin-pointing exact field locations experiencing high crop stress, the tool enables growers to direct scarce irrigation water precisely where it is needed most, bypassing the need for expensive, high-bandwidth data infrastructure or costly consulting services.

Both brothers bring a deep technical and leadership track record from the UTRGV campus to the national stage:

• Eduardo Bello Gonzalez, who serves as Lead Resident Assistant at UTRGV, is the founder and outreach manager of Cowbots Robotics, a university organization dedicated to advancing hands-on robotics and engineering skills among students through certifications and regional competitions.
• Edgar Bello Gonzalez, a junior majoring in computer science with a minor in electrical engineering, serves as a research assistant at UTRGV’s MARS Lab, where he works on autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) capable of mapping and measuring physical surroundings without relying on GPS navigation. A former math tutor at the UTRGV Learning Center and resident assistant, Edgar founded Cowbots Robotics following four years of competitive robotics experience in FRC and VEX.

Tackling Rural Challenges Through Community-Centered AI

Zoho Corporation—headquartered in Austin, Texas, with global operational roots in rural Tenkasi, India—launched the competition to challenge traditional tech sector approaches, which often export high-cost, resource-heavy AI tools to rural regions without consulting local operators.

“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,” said Raju Vegesna, Chief Evangelist at Zoho. “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.”

Contestants were required to adhere to strict criteria, prioritizing small, edge-deployed models capable of running on low hardware requirements, operating with limited connectivity, maintaining strict respect for local community data sovereignty, and accounting for the water and energy footprint of the AI models themselves.

The Competition Field

Team Dos Ojos will present their prototype and pitch deck alongside four other finalist teams representing Texas institutions:

• Team NoNiMo (Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi): Developed BASIN, an auditable, locally run AI tool designed to generate drought scenario models using public precipitation data to assist hydrologists and Region N water planners amid Corpus Christi’s ongoing water crisis.
• Team Land Memory AI (Austin Community College–Round Rock): Created a hybrid mobile/web platform combining farmer observational knowledge with environmental data for localized land stewardship, water management, and wildfire risk mitigation.
• Team CoderOP (Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi): Developed an automated AI workflow utilizing satellite imagery and nighttime log analysis to pinpoint infrastructure leak zones for under-resourced rural water utilities.
• Team Irriga (East Texas A&M University): Built an offline-accessible AI advisor analyzing soil and well sensor data across eight Panhandle counties to optimize irrigation practices over the Ogallala Aquifer.

Public Voting Open Ahead of Final Presentations

Final selections will be determined on September 22 by a panel of industry experts in Pleasanton, California. Public voting is currently open and will account for a portion of each team’s final score.

Members of the Rio Grande Valley community can support Team Dos Ojos by casting a vote online prior to the deadline on Tuesday, September 22, 2026, at 11:00 AM CDT (9:00 AM PT) at: https://zoho.to/ftgu-vote.