Stories of change
The real success of an organisation is always expressed in the impact it has on its people and on others. These are the stories of ordinary village students who made themselves into innovators — how they built things, picked up skills, and grew confident enough to chase what they wanted.
Global Junicorn & AI Summit 2025
From humble backgrounds to building startups
Eight students from government schools in Berhampur and Balasore turned their ideas into startups and pitched them at the ISF Global Junicorn & AI Summit, Texas State University. Every one of them was found through a Young Tinker Space or a Tinker on Wheels visit to their school. Before flying out, all eight cleared their US visas and pitched at Draper Startup House in Hyderabad.
Bhubaneswar
25 May — Media interview at Kalinga Studio, then orientation and kit handover at Young Tinker Academy
Bangalore
26 May — Met the other selected teams; the airport team welcomed them with cake
Dallas
26 May — Touched down in the United States
Austin
27 May — Travelled onward to the summit
Texas State University
28 May — Campus tour and pre-summit preparation
Global Junicorn & AI Summit
28 May — Pitched their ideas on the global stage
Houston
29 May — Met the Friends of Young Tinker, USA
NASA Johnson Space Center
30 May — And a visit to the Indian Consulate in Houston
YTSAT 2.0
Digbijay Sahu & Chiranjib Barik
Govt High School, Soro, Balasore · found through Tinker on Wheels
The problem. Small farmers have no cheap way to see the health of their own soil and crops. Satellite imaging costs too much and is too coarse to help.
The startup. A helium balloon satellite carrying LIDAR, nano-sensors and LoRa. It photographs farmland in real time, reads soil health, crop stress and water levels, and sends the findings straight to a farmer’s phone. A ₹40,000 crore opportunity across 150 million Indian farmers.
Tinker on WheelsYoung Tinker FoundationISF Global Junicorn & AI Summit 🇺🇸Texas State University 🇺🇸Draper Startup House, HyderabadSELF
Rural Volt
Koushik Kar & Sridhar Jena
Govt High School, Soro & Govt High School, Brahmapur
The problem. Villages burn expensive, polluting fuel while crop waste rots unused, and carting fuel in drains the local economy.
The startup. Small ethanol units placed inside the village itself, letting farmers turn crop waste into clean fuel. It cuts emissions and petrol dependence, and creates jobs where people already live. India’s biofuel sector is projected at ₹50,000 crore by 2030.
Tinker on WheelsYoung Tinker SpaceYoung Tinker FoundationISF Global Junicorn & AI Summit 🇺🇸Texas State University 🇺🇸Draper Startup House, HyderabadSELF
Masala GPT
P. Aditya & Soumya Sourav Gouda
Govt High School, Brahmapur · found through Young Tinker Space
The problem. India’s regional spice blends are hard to reproduce consistently, which means uneven cooking and wasted food in kitchens and businesses alike.
The startup. An AI dispenser that mixes more than 500 regional blends from just ten base ingredients. Describe the taste you want and it delivers the blend, like a master chef on call. The global spice market is worth $18 billion.
Young Tinker SpaceYoung Tinker FoundationISF Global Junicorn & AI Summit 🇺🇸Texas State University 🇺🇸Draper Startup House, HyderabadSELF
S.O.B.A.D.Y
Sai Satyam Pradhan
Self-Optimized Battery-Driven Autonomous Yielder
The problem. Much of rural and urban India has no dependable EV charging infrastructure, which keeps clean transport out of reach.
The startup. An autonomous electric vehicle that makes its own power from sun, wind and motion — wheel rotation and vibration — managed by AI. It runs entirely off-grid, pointing at a self-reliant EV ecosystem for energy-scarce regions.
Young Tinker FoundationISF Global Junicorn & AI Summit 🇺🇸Texas State University 🇺🇸Draper Startup House, HyderabadSELF
Eden
Yagyanvalka Mishra
Heritage craft, modern fashion — with EDEN AI
The problem. Indian artisans are losing their livelihoods to Western fast fashion, an industry that discards over 92 million tonnes a year despite sustainable alternatives existing.
The startup. Clothing that joins Indian heritage to modern style through natural fabrics, ethical dyes and handwork — plus EDEN AI, a styling assistant that builds outfits from a prompt or an occasion.
Young Tinker FoundationISF Global Junicorn & AI Summit 🇺🇸Texas State University 🇺🇸Draper Startup House, HyderabadSELF
Individual journeys
Students who started in a workshop, a cycle repair shop or a paddy field, and ended up welding for a rover team, pitching to Intel, or flying a satellite over their own village.
Rina Bagha
Boudh district, Odisha · Welder, NASA HERC team
The pandemic pushed her family into poverty, and the long lockdown brought misery to the life of 18-year-old Rina Bagha. From Boudh district, Rina lived in a rented house and was studying Arts. Her parents are daily labourers who had no work in the first phase of the lockdown, so she went out to look for a job herself. She first tried domestic work in nearby houses, but people were afraid of the virus and turned her away.
After many refusals, desperate for money, she asked a workshop owner for any job at all. He told her the work there was for men. She argued back: “Mu welding karibi!” — I will do welding too. She had no idea what welding was, or what even happened inside a workshop. That is where the foundation stepped in and helped her learn the skill. She went on to join the NASA HERC team as its welder.
Also won
- Winner, IIW National Best Welder for Women 2021 (GMAW), Calcutta
- Winner, IIW National Best Welder for Women 2022 (SMAW), Chennai
- Runner-up, IIW National Best Welder for Women 2023 (GMAW-Pipe), Bangalore
- Participant, IIW ARC Cup International Welding Competition 2023, Pune
- Winner, National Welding League for Women 2024, C V Raman Global University, Bhubaneswar
- Gold medal, Odisha Skill Competition 2024 — welding
- Silver medal, India Skill Competition 2024 — welding
Rishikesh Amit Nayak
Jagatsinghpur, Odisha · Funded at the Intel Global AI Festival
Rishikesh saw what locust attacks did to the farmers of his village — failed crops, and farmers taking their own lives. Those experiences pushed him to look for a solution. Through Young Tinker’s one-year programme he learned to identify problems, to lead and to communicate, and turned that into an AI system that predicts pest attacks before they happen, for about a dollar. It targets the bacterial attacks behind 80% of crop failures. Intel noticed, and funded the project at its Global AI Festival.
His journey started at 16, when he joined Young Tinker Academy. Growing up in a farming family, he felt the uncertainty directly. As he put it: “Farmer suicide due to crop failure is very common. Hailing from a farmer family, I was aware of the issue at a very young age. I decided to work for this cause.”
Rutuparna Jena
Class 9, Govt High School, Soro, Balasore · Parachute lead
Rutuparna never imagined she would launch a satellite, lead a team, or build something that would inspire thousands. A year earlier she wasn’t confident in her own abilities. She joined a team of eight students building a CubeSat to fly on a helium balloon, measuring temperature, humidity and air quality above their village and sending the data back to a ground station. One problem remained: how to bring it down safely.
As parachute lead, that was hers to solve — and her village had no parachutes to buy. Instead of giving up she asked “why not?” and applied the D.M.W. test she had learned at Tinker on Wheels: doable, moneyable, wantable. Every idea failed until she found an old umbrella. She had her teammates calculate its dimensions and asked her mother to stitch it on a sewing machine.
The first designs failed, and some told them village students could not do this. They kept iterating. On 23 December 2024, at Tinkerfest in Soro, in front of 3,000 students, the satellite flew. Rutuparna, who once hesitated to speak, now leads — and when someone says “nahi ho sakta”, she answers “kyun nahi?”
Basudeba Bhoi
Age 15 · Prototype lead, NASA Rover Challenge 2023
Basudev is the son of a daily labourer in the paddy fields. He joined the school for rural innovation in 2015, when he was still working alongside his father on farmland to add to the family income. He is now a specialist in 3D printing, and has built a bionic hand from open-source designs and the equipment at school — a project aimed at giving hope to people with disabilities. He served as prototype lead of the Young Tinker team selected for the NASA Rover Challenge 2023.
Siddhanth Ghosh
Mumbai · Aerospace Engineering, Purdue University 🇺🇸
Siddhanth, 18, has always been captivated by technology and what it can change. His interests run from photography and computer graphics to music production and filmmaking, but rocket science captured him most. He is now reading for a BSc in Aerospace Engineering at Purdue University, deepening his expertise and preparing to make his mark in space exploration.
Sai Akshara Vemuri
Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh · Mechanical Engineering, Georgia Tech 🇺🇸
Akshara holds three world records for reciting the most decimal places of the square root of two in the shortest time, an achievement recognised by the Vice President of India. She is also a national-level archer. She founded The Astro Club, serves as President of the Rotary Interact Club, and built an app for the Andhra Pradesh Red Cross to help meet urgent blood supply needs. She is now studying for a BSc in Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech.
Kailash Chandra Barik
Age 18 · World Rank 3, NASA HERC 2021
Kailash worked with his father in a roadside cycle repair shop. As the eldest, he took odd jobs simply so he could enrol and learn something new. He wanted to be remembered for what he gave back. He was selected for the NaPSAT programme — now Young Tinker — which became India’s first interdisciplinary under-19 student team invited to the NASA Rover Challenge in 2021. The boy who repaired bicycles worked on the transmission fitting of a lunar rover, and his team finished third in the world. He now works as a welding demonstrator at Kemppi, the Finnish welding multinational.