riza mohamed.
Riza Mohamed is a 17-year-old founder, developer, and builder from India focused on AI products, computer vision, edge AI, and developer communities. He started coding at 9 by building Minecraft plugins after school and has been shipping ever since.
how riza got here.
At 9, Riza wrote his first Minecraft plugin. Most kids his age were playing games; he was modding them. That curiosity led him to Python, then AI, then hardware. By 13, he was building coin sorters that caught the attention of state government ministers.
At 14, he placed 2nd globally in Dubai with smart goggles he built on a Raspberry Pi Zero, a computer vision project that identified objects in real time. That same year, he keynoted the IRCC conference alongside Nambi Narayanan, one of India's most celebrated rocket scientists. The audience was hundreds of students. Riza was 14.
At 15, he won at the latest OpenAI hackathon, attended YC SUS India, pitched his startup to Y Combinator partners Jared Friedman and Jon Xu, and met them over dinner.
what riza is building.
Riza builds AI products and runs Zerograd, a builder community for Gen-Z developers. He is reachable at codewithriza@gmail.com.
awards & recognition.
- 3rd place out of 4,500+ participants — OpenAI Codex Hackathon
- 1st place regionally — CBSE National Science Exhibition 2024, Computational Thinking; represented Kerala nationally
- 2nd place globally — International Digital Fest, Dubai (smart goggles, Raspberry Pi Zero)
- 1st place — Malabar Techfest
- 2nd place — International Coding Competition, Dubai
- Chief Minister of Kerala Award
- Stage 2 qualifier — International Olympiad in AI (IOAI)
- Top100Coders Fellow
- Toastmasters International Finalist
- 8x hackathon winner overall