Arjun Oberoi ’26 and Daniel Kim ’26 won the grand prize of $100,000 at the 2025 Microsoft Imagine Cup Competition for their project, Argus, an AI-powered wearable device designed for users with low vision. As the Imagine Cup world champions, Kim and Oberoi will also receive a mentorship session with Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella. 

The Microsoft Imagine Cup is the premier global technology competition for student founders to transform innovative ideas into market-ready startups using AI and Microsoft Cloud. The world championship took place in Redmond, Washington on May 19, where Kim and Oberoi took first place over two other finalists from the U.S. and Rwanda.

Argus is a two-part vision device for identifying objects, navigating spaces and recognizing faces and seeks to assist people with impaired vision. 

“We both have grandparents who live with visual impairments. Watching them struggle with a lot of their everyday tasks was something that really inspired us to create something to make an impact on the world,” Oberoi said.

The two parts of the wearable refer to the hybrid usage of edge computing and cloud AI to process and store data, which reduces the latency and complexities of connecting to Wi-Fi or relying only on cloud. Argus also uses Wi-R, a communication technology that uses 100 times less power than Wi-Fi.

Oberoi, who is majoring in electrical engineering and computer science, and Kim, who is majoring in computer science, started the project their freshman winter. Although they knew each other through their dorm, the two started collaborating after bumping into each other in shared building and entrepreneurship activities.  

“Whenever we would go to a hackathon together, we would end up winning. We realized that there was really great synergy there. Arjun and I complement each other in skill sets, and we have similar interests and drive for solving problems,” Kim said.

Oberoi was the former president and team lead for the Stanford Solar Car Project. Kim has worked as a neuroscience research assistant for the Graduate School of Education.

The pair worked on the completely self-motivated project during nights, weekends and school breaks. While it was a challenge to cut down on costs, the process was “kind of a blessing in disguise where we ended up creating something that inherently had to be affordable,” said Kim. 

Oberoi and Kim’s personal connection to the problem prioritized usability of the product for those less technologically literate, they said. These design decisions came in the form of creating a hardware solution rather than a mobile app.

“Part of [designing with target user in mind] comes with it just being as simple and accessible as possible for people with visual impairments. And that means that we wanted it to have pretty much no screens, because if you have a phone app, then people have to actually fumble with that,” said Oberoi.

Another design decision was keeping the glasses light and ensuring all-day battery life, as well as haptics. 

Kim and Oberoi had previously beat 15,000 U.S. applicants to win the Red Bull Basement National Final in 2024 with Argus, going on to represent the U.S. in the world finals in Tokyo. After the contest, they were referred by Red Bull to enter in the Imagine Cup. 

The team expressed the helpfulness of mentorship from Microsoft for Startups, AMD and the Red Bull community.

Going forward, Oberoi and Kim are focused on scaling Argus through feature engineering, user testing and potential production.

“What we plan on doing is creating molds for Argus and then getting a couple hundred devices into the hands of beta users,” Kim said. “From there, we’re hoping to do a full launch, either through the consumer hardware route or possibly under the FDA as a durable medical device.” Another potential path is partnering with Microsoft to incorporate customized hardware into their applications.

Devin Gupta ‘26, who met Kim through Stanford’s Structured Liberal Education (SLE) program and collaborated with him on several projects and hackathons, described Kim as “super talented and hardworking, always looking for incredible opportunities.”

Connor Hoffman ’27, the current president of the Stanford Solar Car Project, reflected on Oberoi’s impact. “I was introduced to Solar Car through Arjun. He was super welcoming and incredibly capable,” he said. “It’s pretty exciting that he won, and I’m not surprised. He’s a very, very capable individual.”

“Every time I meet the Imagine Cup finalists, I’m inspired by their passion, ingenuity and the bold ways they’re using AI to tackle problems that matter in their communities and around the world,” said Annie Pearl, the corporate vice president and general manager of Azure Experiences and Ecosystems. “They’re not just imagining what is possible with AI — they’re building it.”

The article has been updated to factually reflect that Daniel Kim’s current major is computer science.