Rain is a real turnoff for these smart sprinklers
Northeastern student Khushi Shah turned a middle school science project into Drizzl, a smart irrigation startup fighting water waste.
Khushi Shah’s entrepreneurial journey began in middle school, when she traveled to India, her parents’ homeland.
Visiting family in the western state of Gujarat, she saw women and girls walking miles each day for clean water.
“These people were either mothers or young girls who were missing out on working or raising their children, or going to school,” says Shah, now a third-year Northeastern University student studying computer science and business administration.
Back in the Midwest, where agriculture accounts for nearly half of daily water use, she ruminated about what she could do to make a dent in the clean water shortage issue. One day, she looked outside her window and saw someone’s sprinklers going on in the rain.
“I was like, ‘Well, that’s a waste,’” Shah says. “And then you compare the opposing realities, and you realize there is something that we could be doing much better. And it starts at home.”
“Although I couldn’t tackle the whole water crisis, I did a lot of research,” she says. “The goal that I had in mind when I created this was to optimize our water usage, but minimize wastage in terms of water and also money.”
That realization sparked the idea for what would eventually become Drizzl, a smart irrigation system she launched commercially last year. Drizzl combines weather data, soil sensors and predictive technology to automatically control sprinklers and irrigation systems so that water is only used when it’s needed.
This summer, Northeastern’s Women Who Empower named Shah one of the inaugural Innovator Fellows of the 2025 Innovator Awards.
The nine-month fellowship will provide resources to accelerate Innovator Fellows’ professional development, including mentorship, global connections and venture support. The inaugural program will culminate in a showcase at the 2026 Northeastern Global Leadership Summit in London.
“I’m very excited to see the types of resources and mentorship that we can get,” Shah says. “That’s what I’m really looking for right now … with my residential launch coming up.”
Shah first decided to tackle irrigation as a middle school science fair project.
She started building different prototypes. Her project performed so well at the science fair that it drew attention from Google, NASA and the U.S. Navy.
By high school, she had also discovered entrepreneurship.
“That’s when I decided, let me fuse these [two] to turn this into a company,” Shah says. “That’s been my venture since then.”
She graduated high school a year early to focus on her venture, competing in pitch contests, joining accelerators and laying the groundwork for Drizzl.
“I think that was a leap of faith,” she says. “I’ve always been a very, ambitious, go-big-or-go-home type of person, and I knew that independence, being by myself in that situation was something that was either going to be the best or worst experience of my life. And it ended up being one of the best.”
Her parents — both engineers and small business owners — offered guidance and connected her with colleagues. She learned about water conservation and taught herself coding, sensors and hardware design.
“Working with hardware and software at that age was very different from what it looks like now,” she says. “Tech is something that’s changing so fast, and so being able to keep up with that is a challenge of its own, but also growing in my own personal journey and journey as a founder, I think I’ve had a lot of mindset shifts over the years, and I think that’s been very visible in my company and my product as well.”
Drizzl combines both hardware and software. A user gets several small sensors that go into the lawn to measure soil moisture and a small controller device that connects via Bluetooth to the Drizzl app. The controller can be plugged into any existing irrigation system, allowing the app to turn zones on or off automatically.
What sets Drizzl apart, Shah says, is predictive technology. While competitor apps controlling the irrigation system might show weather forecasts, Shah’s system assesses real-time data from the soil sensors, historical trends and weather forecasts in the next 48 hours and schedules irrigation in advance. While other brands have rain sensors, their systems don’t communicate stop messages until they physically feel precipitation.
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Shah is also evaluating ways to incorporate artificial intelligence into her product to stay ahead of the competition.
She has filed for a patent covering how the system communicates and predicts the weather. The technology can be used for other dispensing products, she says, such as fertilizers or pesticides.
“I really didn’t want to limit myself in the way that I could expand this and continue to create more original creations with it,” Shah says.
Drizzl has already been piloted with golf courses, college campuses and municipalities in the Midwest. Shah is testing it in agriculture and exploring expansion to South America. A residential version will launch in the winter.
“Planning on launching that online and then, hopefully, through some retailers as well,” she says.
Shah chose Northeastern after touring multiple schools and feeling an immediate connection to the Boston campus. She was drawn to the mix of modernity and strong academic tradition, she says, as well as its unique co-op program. While she wasn’t focused on pursuing a corporate path, she appreciated the entrepreneurial opportunities, such as the Sherman Center’s venture co-op, that showed the university’s support for students who want to build their own projects.
Shah spent her first year of college on Northeastern’s London campus. The next year in Boston, she joined Northeastern’s Entrepreneurs Club as director of its incubator. Now vice president, she helps students develop their own ventures while continuing to grow Drizzl as its sole full-time employee.
“I really do see this as the next big smart tech, smart home product,” she says. “ And I want to take it to that level. “
Shah has bootstrapped and self-funded Drizzl from the start, but she is now in talks with venture capitalists and eager to scale the company to a much larger level. She is also interested in exploring new side projects.
“I’ve started to dabble in a couple of new projects that I’m working on on the side and ready to start soft-launching those as the years go on,” she says.
