Kevin Xu Innovation Challenge Names Winners

Oxford, UK –  November 2025 – Equitech Futures and the Rhodes Trust have announced the winners of the Kevin Xu Innovation Challenge, recognizing three groundbreaking projects that demonstrate how technology can expand opportunity and create abundance in areas traditionally defined by scarcity.

OpenDoor, founded by Diya Sreedhar, took first place for building infrastructure to connect people experiencing housing insecurity with existing social services. The LA-born platform addresses a billion-dollar problem: not a lack of resources, but the inability of people in need to access them. By creating what users call a "shared nervous system for the care ecosystem," OpenDoor has demonstrated results that matter—residents in pilot programs connected to verified help three times faster, with follow-through on referrals increasing by 50%.

"Homelessness is not really about poverty as much as it's about information and equity," said Sreedhar, who was inspired by four years of volunteering at LA shelters. OpenDoor's AI-powered service matcher and job training agent catch people during transitional periods—after a job loss or medical emergency—before they fall into chronic homelessness.

The runners-up represent equally ambitious visions of abundance in education and governance:

Koan, an eight-person student-led team spanning four continents, is transforming how schools approach AI in education. Rather than fighting against AI tools, Koan's platform makes the learning process visible, using a Socratic AI guide named Aidan to help students develop critical thinking skills. Launching pilots in Chicago and Evanston, Illinois this fall, Koan is building what founder Bo Liu and his team call "cognitive lift" metrics to measure metacognition—not just final outputs.

Bureaucrazy, created by Equitech Scholars Labbi Karmacharya, Aakriti Ghimire, and Aayusha Shrestha, is building civic infrastructure from scratch. What began as a chatbot to navigate government paperwork pivoted after Nepal's Gen Z revolution to help tens of thousands of young people register to vote. The team is compiling and structuring foundational civic data that doesn't exist in digitized form—essentially creating the democratic infrastructure their country needs in real time.

The Kevin Xu Innovation Challenge was held in conjunction with the 2025 Rhodes Forum on Technology & Society, which explored the theme of "Abundance"—moving beyond scarcity-driven thinking to imagine futures where housing, healthcare, clean energy, and opportunity are expanded rather than constrained.

"These three teams embody what abundance thinking looks like in practice," said Linda Kinning Director of Ventures at Equitech Futures who helped run the challenge. "They're not waiting for systems to change. They're building the connective tissue, the educational foundations, and the civic infrastructure that make abundance possible for their communities."

All three projects demonstrate a common principle: abundance isn't about creating new resources, but about removing barriers that prevent people from accessing what already exists. OpenDoor connects existing social services. Koan builds and protects attentional resources for students globally. Bureaucrazy makes government information accessible when it was trapped in filing cabinets and institutional memory.

The Kevin Xu Innovation Challenge supports innovators building AI tools that empower people to lead more productive and meaningful lives, with particular focus on applications that expand access and opportunity on a global scale.

About Equitech Futures and the Rhodes Trust

Equitech Futures works to build a global network of technologists committed to using their skills for public good. The Rhodes Trust at the University of Oxford supports exceptional young people from around the world. Together, they launched the Kevin Xu Innovation Challenge to identify and support the next generation of civic technologists addressing humanity's most pressing challenges.

For more information about the winning projects:

• OpenDoor: opendoor-tech.com
• Koan: koanlearn.com
• Bureaucrazy: bureaucrazy.co