Khushboo Jain didn’t set out to start a company. She set out to finish her PhD. When she joined the I-Corps program as an entrepreneurial lead, she was deep in her research at the University of South Dakota, working on ways to use remote sensing technology to monitor agricultural practices on the ground. Whether any of it could become something commercial wasn’t really on her radar. “I never thought that solution could go to a market, and it might be useful to other people,” she said.
What she found, through more than 100 customer discovery interviews conducted across both the regional and national I-Corps programs, was a market that looked nothing like what she expected, and a valuable idea.
Khushboo and her team, which included co-entrepreneurial lead Abhinav Chandel, principal investigator Dr. Ranjeet John, and industry mentor Dr. Nathan Torbick, came into the program assuming farmers were their customer. It made sense on paper. Their technology was built to track the kinds of regenerative practices farmers were adopting, and farmers had plenty of reason to want better documentation of what they were doing. But when the interviews started, the picture got complicated fast.
Before I-Corps, we thought our customers were farmers,” Khushboo said. So that’s who they talked to first, and after ten or fifteen conversations, something wasn’t adding up. Farmers cared about the outcomes, but their technology couldn’t actually solve their problem. “I thought maybe my idea was a waste,” she said. “And it won’t help anyone.”
That was the low point, and also the turning point. Their industry mentor pointed them toward a different set of contacts in companies and organizations working alongside farmers rather than the farmers themselves. Carbon project developers, agribusiness operations managers, sustainability officers; people who were actively looking for exactly what EarthMaze was building and coming up empty. “When we started talking to them, we realized these people do need this solution,” Khushboo said.
Getting those conversations was its own challenge. Nobody inside a large organization is eager to take a meeting with a PhD student they’ve never heard of, and the team spent months sending LinkedIn messages that went unanswered, attending conferences specifically to conduct interviews, and leaning on every connection they had. “It was really disheartening at times,” Khushboo said, “because you were sending so many messages in a day and you might not get one response back.” But something shifted through the process. A self-described introvert, she had always stayed close to familiar faces at conferences, but I-Corps made that impossible. “I had to go out and talk to someone else — it was so much out of my comfort zone,” she said. “It boosts something in you which I think everyone needs.”
The team completed both the regional and national I-Corps programs, and what followed came quickly. EarthMaze won first place in the student category at the 2025 South Dakota Governor’s Giant Vision Competition, secured prototype funding through SD Fast Launch, and launched an LLC. They are now pursuing investors and partners and working toward early customer onboarding. “Regionals and nationals gave us that confidence,” Khushboo said. “We wouldn’t have ever gone to the South Dakota Giant Vision Competition, or even applied for more funding, if it was not for them.”
Her advice to any student researcher sitting on a promising idea and wondering whether I-Corps is worth the time: “There’s nothing to lose, but a lot to gain. Just go for it.”