Meet the Winners of the Raj Shamani Builders’ Contest
The Raj Shamani Builders’ Contest has its winners. Deependra Singh Tomar took first place, Madhur Mishra took second, and Anshuman Dash and Thalachiri Ranjith Chowdary shared third. All four are Indian business owners who used Emergent to build working software for a real problem, with no coding background required.
Run in partnership with entrepreneur and content creator Raj Shamani, the contest asked business owners to find a bottleneck in their own operations, build software to fix it, and put it into real use. More than 2,100 entries came in. Here are the four builds that stood out.
Table: The four winning builds at a glance
Deependra Singh Tomar won first place with HisabX
HisabX is a daily accounts and cash-reconciliation app for petrol pump dealers, and Deependra built it for his own forecourt before rolling it out to others. At a fuel station, every shift ends with a manual reconciliation of nozzle readings, cash, and credit sales, and that process is slow and easy to fudge.
HisabX cut that from about 45 minutes on paper to roughly 8, with an audit trail that cannot be quietly rewritten, running offline-first on a low-cost Android phone. It is a clear example of what the contest rewarded: a dealer who knew the workflow better than any developer would, building the tool around it.
Madhur Mishra took second place with Agro Madat
Agro Madat is a farm-management operating system built for Indian farmers in the Neemuch and Mandsaur belt of Madhya Pradesh. It pulls the scattered tools a farmer needs into one app that works on a rural network. In one place, a farmer gets:
- Live wholesale mandi prices
- 7-day weather forecasts with hailstorm alerts
- Crop-disease diagnosis from a photo
- An irrigation advisor
- PMFBY crop-insurance claim help
- Medicinal-herb traceability for buyers
It runs in English, Hindi, and Hinglish, with offline support. This is software a farmer would normally never have access to, built by someone who understands the belt firsthand.
Anshuman Dash and Thalachiri Ranjith Chowdary shared third place
Third place went to two builders who solved very different problems. The two split the ₹20 lakh third-place prize, ₹10 lakh each.
1. Anshuman Dash built Raizee.ai
Raizee.ai is an AI-native fundraising workspace that runs the parts of a raise founders usually manage in spreadsheets. A founder describes what they are raising, and Raizee returns a ranked investor list with a fit score, drafts personalized outreach for each one, and tracks the pipeline from first contact to close. For a solo founder running a lean round, it replaces a stack of disconnected tools with one system.
2. Thalachiri Ranjith Chowdary built becAIm Business
becAIm Business turns a company's goals into daily tasks for its team. Managers set a target, the app assigns each person their next step, and everyone can see who is on track and where things are slipping. It runs on manual goals from day one, with no integrations required to start.
The contest drew builders from across India
The four winners came out of a much larger field. Emergent and Raj Shamani also recognized a group of finalists whose builds stood out, drawn from business owners and operators across India.
It is a snapshot of who is building with AI right now: not engineers by training, but people solving problems in businesses they run themselves.
Build your own software on Emergent
All four winners are non-developers who built for their own operations: a petrol dealer, a farmer serving other farmers, a founder raising capital, and a builder working on team execution. Each described a workflow they knew well, and Emergent built the software around it.
The Raj Shamani Builders’ Contest was one of several builder contests Emergent runs. There is also Builder Fest, a global series of country-specific contests with local prize pools, live now in France and Indonesia through 25 August. You can find every contest, event, and builders’ challenge on the AI contests page.
Every winner started with a problem they already understood, not a line of code. Describe yours in plain language and Emergent builds the software around it.
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