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This 22-year-old made an app to help farmers predict risks to their crops
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This 22-year-old made an app to help farmers predict risks to their crops

Soj Gamayon beat out 110,000 applicants to win the Red Bull Basement World Final in Tokyo with an app that translates complex data for farmers.

Jeremy Caplan
Fast Company, 2025
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Filipino rice farmers often lose 30% of their potential harvest to pests, disease, and weather. To respond to those losses, local entrepreneur Soj Gamayon, 22, created AgriConnect, an app that gives rice farmers, like his family, an easy-to-read indication of potential hazards and suggests actionable solutions. As Jeremy Caplan reports in Fast Company, the AI-powered app won the Red Bull Basement World Final tech competition, opening the door for Gamayon to form a partnership with Silicon Valley’s Plug and Play. He hopes to refine his technology, develop other partnerships, and expand the app to support farmers who grow produce and raise livestock.  

Summary

Filipino entrepreneur Soj Gamayon won the Red Bull Basement World Final with an AI-powered app that helps traditional rice farmers.

Rice is a global staple, but growing it is risky. The winner of the Red Bull Basement World Final 2024, Soj Gamayon, 22, knows this first-hand. His family grows rice in the Philippines, where it accounts for 12% of GDP, but where farmers lose 30% of their annual yield due to insufficient information about pests, diseases, and extreme weather.

Gamayon’s AgriConnect app addresses that lack by using AI to provide farmers with a traffic-light warning system that analyzes complex risk data. It shows farmers what actions they need to take to avoid crop loss. The app uses color indicators to show if conditions are good (green), if weather or pests are an impending...

About the Author

Jeremy Caplan is a director at CUNY’s Newmark Graduate School of Journalism and the creator of the Wonder Tools newsletter on Substack.  

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