This 16-year-old refused a $300,000 offer to drop out of high school and now runs his own AI company

• Rudrojas Kunvar, 16, developed Evion, an artificial intelligence tool that helps farmers analyze crop health.

• The vehicle collects aerial product data from images captured by a drone.

• Kunvar created Evion to make this data more accessible to small and medium-sized farms.

While meeting with a venture capitalist last year, 16-year-old Rudrojas Kunvar received an offer that would excite even the most reserved teenager: he would drop out of high school and accept $300,000 to run his artificial intelligence startup full-time.

“It was definitely a tough thought process for a few weeks,” Kunvar, who lives in Germantown, Maryland, told Business Insider. “That’s a lot of money.”

Kunvar spent the summer before developing Evion, a free AI product analysis tool that uses images taken by him. basic camera drones which farmers themselves can purchase.

The AI ​​model analyzes the images and creates a crop health map that farmers can integrate into their existing platforms or access through a dashboard. Green means healthy and red means unhealthy.

“Farmers can use this to predict the future of their crops,” Kunvar said. “Instead of spraying everywhere, you can see which areas need more water or fertilizer.”

Like construction and defense, drones are also getting a makeover America’s agricultural industry. The number of agricultural drones registered with the Federal Aviation Administration increased from approximately 1,000 in 2024 to approximately 5,500 in 2025, according to Michigan State University researchers.

Kunvar said Evion can help farmers save money because targeted data can eliminate uncertainty about crop health, meaning farmers will be less likely to waste water or fertilizer.

Kunvar says Evion is positioned as an alternative to companies marketing expensive agricultural drone products or services. Instead, farmers can buy cheap camera drones, take their own photos, and upload the information themselves.

“This is intended to be a more affordable plan for these low- and medium-sized farms,” ​​Kunvar said.

Business Insider’s Young Geniuses series spotlights the next generation of founders, innovators, and thinkers who are working to reshape industries and solve global challenges. see more stories in the seriesor contact the editor Peter Gelling to share your own story.

After founding Evion, Kunvar partnered with Jacob Lee, who had experience building technology tools, to expand its reach. Kunvar launched the first pilot in the fall.

Ultimately, Kunvar rejected the $300,000 exit offer, saying he wanted to ensure his product remained accessible and was not seeking profit.

It all started with a question

The idea behind Evion emerged while attending a community festival during Kunvar’s sophomore year at Poolesville High School in Montgomery County. One-third of Montgomery County designated as state Agricultural Reserveor protected native land aimed at protecting the countryside.

“I asked a farmer how they could tell that a disease was approaching or what a slight color change meant,” Kunvar said. “He said he actually guessed. I talked to a few other farmers and noticed a common thread among all their answers.”

Kunvar, who said he has had a lifelong love of technology, was surprised.

“We’ve had a lot of AI advancements across a variety of sectors and across a variety of industries,” he said. “Why isn’t much happening in agriculture?”

Initially, Kunvar wanted to create his own fleet of fully autonomous drones capable of capturing data, but after talking with his mentors and crunching the numbers, he went in a different direction. Instead, he studied drones and identified what was driving up their cost: a multispectral camera.

“The camera was the biggest cost. ‘What if there was a way to get similar data without needing this camera? What if I could use a simple camera?'” Kunvar said. “I wondered,” he said.

He pointed in that direction Tesla and autonomous vehicles As proof that it works. Unlike Waymo and other companies that use Lidar, Tesla relies on cameras.

After establishing the logistics and AI model, the founders sought out customers by sending cold emails and LinkedIn messages. But they’ve had better luck partnering with agriculture-focused nonprofits and organizations to reach farmers.

Now the technology is helping farmers in North America, Southeast Asia and India.

As for future plans, Kunvar wants to continue growing Evion while exploring opportunities in different areas, including AI infrastructure.

“There is a lot of uncertainty in entrepreneurship, especially in start-ups, but I have learned that there is beauty in uncertainty,” Kunvar said. “There were times when nothing was going right and then you get the slightest win and you’re like ‘wow, maybe I can do that’.”

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