Stanford students win the 2025 Imagine Cup with a device to help people with low vision

Updated May 19, 2025, to reflect that Team Argus was named the 2025 Imagine Cup World Champion and will receive $100,000 and a mentorship session with Microsoft Chief Executive and Chairman Satya Nadella.

Daniel Kim’s 76-year-old grandmother, Lin Lee, always seemed invincible to him. 

She’s a second-degree black belt in taekwondo and grew up amid the hardship of the Korean War. She immigrated to the US not speaking any English and worked in kitchens to make ends meet. 

Daniel says she’s overcome a lot of challenges, but she’s faced persistent issues with her eyes, including a detached retina.  

“She has all these incredible capabilities, but watching her age into low vision was something extremely visceral and emotional,” Daniel said. 

Arjun Oberoi, Daniel’s friend at Stanford University in Palo Alto, had a similar experience watching his grandfather struggle with macular degeneration.  

From that shared experience came the spark of an innovative idea. What if their grandparents had a device they could talk to—an AI-powered assistant to help them find the right pill bottle or warn them of an obstacle they could trip over?  

That’s the origin story of Argus, a two-part device that responds to voice commands to help the user identify objects, recognize faces, and navigate the world. Arjun and Daniel named their project after Argus Panoptes, the Greek god known as the “all-seeing one.”  

Their innovative idea has paid off. On May 19, 2025, at the annual Microsoft Build conference, Daniel and Arjun received the great news that Team Argus is the 2025 Imagine Cup World Champion. That means they’ll take home $100,000 USD and a mentorship session with Microsoft Chief Executive and Chairman Satya Nadella.

Imagine Cup World Championship 

The Imagine Cup is Microsoft’s premier global technology startup competition for student founders. Daniel and Arjun were among three finalist teams that all demonstrated ingenuity and exceptional problem solving, rising to the top of a highly competitive pool of submissions from more than 75 countries.  

Taking home the top prize in the Imagine Cup adds to the significant success Daniel and Arjun have already achieved, having also won the Red Bull Basement US National Final competition last November.  

“What started as a passion project in our dorm has grown into something so much larger,” Daniel said. “This win is proof that anyone with the right support and an intense desire to make a change can make a difference—even students.”

He added that he and Arjun hope the win sends a reminder that accessibility isn’t just a feature, “it’s a fundamental right,” and that it’s important to build products with empathy at the forefront.

Now juniors, Daniel and Arjun met in their first year at Stanford and bonded over a mutual interest in tech and startups. Arjun is studying computer science and electrical engineering, while Daniel is studying math and neuroscience. 

They began tinkering on Argus in their freshman year. They knew that many people would benefit from such a device, given that millions of people worldwide have conditions that limit their vision, including age-related macular degeneration, cataracts, and glaucoma. 

They then created a small compute module that a person can tuck into a pocket and a small camera module that attaches to a pair of eyeglasses. Arjun says two technological advancements were key to creating Argus.  

“The first is Wi-R, which uses your skin as a wireless transmission medium. It uses 100 times less power than traditional Wi-Fi, which enables our camera module to be both super-light and have an all-day battery life,” Arjun said. “The second is our combination of edge and cloud AI models.” 

Their hybrid AI architecture processes simple commands locally and routes more complex queries to the cloud, leveraging Azure AI Foundry’s wide range of AI models and capabilities. Arjun says one big advantage of the way they designed Argus is that it doesn’t rely on a phone to work.  

Future plans for Argus 

Daniel says they hope to be able to start clinical trials and ultimately get approval from the US Food and Drug Administration, so Argus could be designated as “durable medical equipment” covered by Medicare.

“That would be huge in terms of making this more accessible to people of all income groups,” he said. 

The two young entrepreneurs say they’re committed to pursuing their dream of helping people with low vision navigate the world more easily and independently.  

They already have earned the stamp of approval from Daniel’s grandmother, who recently tested it out. 

“She talked to me about how touched she was,” Daniel said. He said she recalled how, as a kid, he was always willing to jump in and help her with things like carrying groceries.  

“She said that she felt like I was doing the same thing with Argus, but in a bigger way.”