Homebuilding can be a tedious and exhausting journey for families when they are trying to design their forever home. Cayden Hutcheson’s family is all too familiar with the stressful process.
Hutcheson’s family experienced an exhausting homebuilding dilemma after calling multiple builders to collect quotes and navigating zoning questions that were not easily answered. Ultimately, the whole plan fell through.
That frustration led Hutcheson, Eric Lee and Tri Nguyen — all computer science students in the College of AI, Cyber and Computing — to develop Vision, an AI-based platform to help streamline the homebuilding process. The idea was rooted in frustration and financial loss from the homebuilding project that never made it past the planning stage. Motivated by Hutcheson’s family’s experience, the Vision platform was designed to make the homebuilding process more transparent and accountable.
“We took that frustration and built around it,” Hutcheson said. “The platform pulls together zoning, permitting, environmental and infrastructure data in one place so homebuilders and developers can quickly assess whether a site is viable before committing time and money to it.”
Red Bull Basement competition
The UT San Antonio students took their AI project to the 2026 Red Bull Basement competition, which landed them as one of 15 finalists in the U.S. National Finals of the event.
The team rose from a pool of roughly 24,000 U.S. applicants and more than 100,000 submissions worldwide. It was also one of only two Texas teams to advance.
Red Bull Basement is a global innovation competition and incubator that supports students and first-time entrepreneurs as they develop technology- and AI-based solutions to real-world problems.
As part of the application process, the team submitted a 1-minute video pitch that earned them a spot in the national finals in Detroit, where they pitched Vision to renowned judges.
Lee said the national finals created a valuable opportunity to share the team’s idea and meet other ambitious students from across the country.
“The experience taught me how important communication and storytelling are when pitching a startup idea,” Lee said. “Our platform features house generation, cost breakdowns, builder search and a build schedule, which can all be centralized and finished in minutes.”
For Nguyen, one of the highlights of competing was listening to other teams pitch their ideas and observing how different groups approached problem-solving.
“This experience will help me in future competitions and entrepreneurial projects by giving me a stronger foundation for innovations, business strategy and end-to-end product development,” Nguyen said. “It reinforced the importance of thinking outside the box and taught me how to take an idea from concept to execution.”
Although Vision did not advance to the World Finals in San Francisco this summer, the students will be busy with internships.
Hutcheson, a computer science major concentrating in data science and minoring in mathematics, is interning as a systems engineer at MITRE on the Cyber Effects and Information Warfare team. On campus, he serves as co-director of RowdyHacks, UT San Antonio’s hackathon. He is also running Vorpex LLC, his own software consultancy focused on building data and AI tools for industrial and financial clients.
Nguyen is interning at Cooledtured LLC, an online retailer specializing in pop culture collectibles, while Lee will spend his summer as a remote software engineer intern at Progressive Insurance. In the fall, Lee will return to campus as president of the Association for Computing Machinery, the largest student tech organization at UT San Antonio.
