#StartupsEverywhere Profile: Aditya Vishwanath, Co-Founder & CEO, Inspirit VR
This profile is part of #StartupsEverywhere, an ongoing series highlighting startup leaders in ecosystems across the country. This interview has been edited for length, content, and clarity.
Transforming the Experience for K-12 Students in STEM Education
Inspirit VR is a Palo Alto-based virtual reality technology platform that is looking to revolutionize the way children learn and harness their imagination by providing new experiences right in the classroom. We spoke to Co-Founder & CEO Aditya Vishwanath about the work his company is doing, his experience navigating the U.S. immigration system as a founder, and what the day-to-day experience is like for a startup leader navigating a wide array of compliance frameworks in the U.S. and abroad.
Tell us about your background. What led you to Inspirit?
I am from India, and I come from a family of educators—my mom is a school teacher there. I ran an education nonprofit in India in the world of makerspaces. Fast forward years later to when I was working on my PhD at Stanford University and I stumbled upon the world of virtual reality (VR) and immersive learning. What I found was there was a decade's worth of evidence that showed how this technology could be used to measurably improve student outcomes in the classroom. But there were multiple factors that I had to think about how to navigate, including what access, integration, and cost could look like if I wanted this to be a potential business opportunity that could benefit K-12 students. Additionally, there is this weird dynamic that technology has in K-12 education systems, where tech education innovation is often seen as this glamorous, shiny new thing that gets dropped off by some engineer from Silicon Valley, but is only used once, and then collects dust on the shelf. But even with challenges ahead, I was determined to tackle these hurdles, and two years ago my co-founder and I launched Inspirit.
Tell us more about your company. What does Inspirit do?
I believe that science, math, and all the “STEAM” disciplines are experiential—they are to be learned through doing. Education methods like slideshow presentations and static textbook assignments have not worked for Gen Z and younger generations because these are kids that are coming from high-tech worlds, like Roblox and TikTok, where they're not just consumers of information, but they're also creators. Now they're demanding learning that is truly meaningful to them. So that’s where we come in. Think of us as a real-world version of the “Magic School Bus.” Using our platform on VR headsets enables students to shrink in size and enter the human body, for example. They can “go inside” a cell and learn about protein synthesis or DNA replication. Or maybe instead, the student travels to Mars and learns about Newton's laws of motion—except using Inspirit VR, you can actually alter the level of gravity.
Inspirit values having environments that are free roam worlds that give students a better understanding of the world they live in. Our learning modules come with teacher worksheets, guides, and resources that align with individual state education standards. (Navigating standards alignment is a whole beast of its own.) And our modules are not one-to-one VR. These are just quick simulations built around the idea of kids collaborating with each other in the real world on said modules. So you don't need a very expensive kit of, say, 25 headsets for the classroom of 25 kids. Instead, something more like five units for the classroom for the 25 kids is fully sufficient.
Today, we've seen 600,000 unique students and teachers that have used Inspirit in K-12 institutions. We work with a bunch of education organizations internationally, and almost 25 school districts in the U.S.—which includes every single region of the U.S. and Puerto Rico. Additionally, of the students we work with in the U.S., a large number are at Title I schools or are on free and reduced lunch programs. What enables us to do this, in part, is our partnership with Meta, that allows us to give all the schools we work with free VR hardware. We’re very excited to continue to partner with these schools and make this new approach to STEAM education work.
Can you tell us a little more about your experience as an immigrant startup founder? What ways do you think that policymakers can better support immigrant founders like you?
One of our investment partners is Unshackled Ventures—a venture capital (VC) firm which invests in companies led by immigrant founders and helps them navigate the immigration system—and they were critical to my journey. Their support got me all the way through to getting my green card. But when I started out with the idea for the company, I was on a student visa. My university gave me no support in figuring out the logistics of transitioning to the relevant visas to get me to a place where I could legally run and operate and build out a business as a co-founder. I think it’s important to point out that it was not just the lack of access to resources, but also a lack of information that exists for entrepreneurs about what options or pathways you can explore to get into a place where you can legally both incorporate and run a company. I eventually got approved for the O-1 visa after graduating. I was lucky, though, because I have a specific background which made me a strong candidate for that visa. I know that other founders come here with the aspiration to start a company but will get left out through that process, despite demonstrating success metrics like raising venture capital investment, because they don’t have the right background or the thousands of dollars to file the right visa application.
For every founder that is an international student I know from Stanford, there are at least two others I know who are going back to their home countries to start a company because it's a great time to build a company today in Southeast Asia, India, and in all parts of Europe. I even had multiple options to move to Canada to start my company overnight. If I wanted to, it was very clear to me what I had to do to go straight to Canada and a lot of our investors would have been very comfortable with investing in me as a Canadian founder as well. The U.S. is losing out on so much talent and it’s clear to me that there should be a strong incentive for policymakers to really streamline our immigration system or set up some type of startup or entrepreneur visa.
What has been your experience as a startup serving clients both in the U.S. and internationally?
In addition to the U.S. and Puerto Rico, we work with institutions in Europe, Asia, and will very soon in Africa. One issue we’ve encountered is difficulty distributing VR hardware. The process of distributing hardware internationally can bring in import-export considerations, such as shipping duties and other taxes that come into play and can be hard for us to navigate as a startup. It also gets murky because we’re working with schools and institutions that qualify as nonprofits in many cases, so they're tax exempt, but the headset is just a piece of hardware that’s seen at customs as something that's taxable. This isn’t something that happens with a lot of other tech hardware edtech companies need, such as computers, because either they are locally manufactured or there are local vendors that sell them. We’re lucky we have hardware company partners that are working to figure out those pieces of the puzzle.
The other broad issues we encounter are around data privacy and data transfers. We work with students and doing right by them is very important to us. As a result, data privacy is something we invest heavily in, and minimize the amount of user data we actually encounter.
At a policy level, data privacy is something that is highly regulated. We must sign specific data protection agreements with all the different institutions that use our platform. Being in compliance and signing these agreements is important, but it is also very expensive, and each of the unique agreements adds time to the process. These factors are compounded because each country or region has their own different requirements. Europe, for example, has the strict General Data Protection Regulation, but one beneficial aspect of the European framework is that it’s uniform across Europe. That makes it much easier to understand what you need to do to be compliant in multiple jurisdictions. Whereas in the U.S., many states have their own rules—or no rules—and we have to approach compliance in every state on a case-by-case basis. Most people who are creating platforms like I am have no legal or policy background whatsoever. We're all engineers, designers, or creators. So trying to figure out how to build a business in an environment with differing rules about the same issue becomes hard and expensive.
Does Inspirit leverage remote work? What has your experience been like, and is there anything policymakers could do to help?
We’re a remote company, which is great because it enables us to bring on valuable team members that we wouldn’t otherwise be able to from a practical standpoint. But hiring new remote employees across the U.S. can be an administrative nightmare. We’re able to use some other software systems and third-party vendors to help us navigate the various processes, but it’s still a huge lift to hire someone in different states for the first time. Each state has different income tax rules and business registrations that need to be established before you can even technically bring on an employee there.
As an example, we hired our first employee out of Florida and the amount of time required to get all the necessary registrations in place and compliance checks completed, resulted in us not being able to pay the person we hired in their first pay period at our company. Thankfully, they were very patient about it and we were able to make it right. But every time we want to hire someone in a different U.S. state we have to go through that entire process of registering with agencies and going through compliance checks again which takes time and drains our financial resources. It's something which we have to do and we will do but it does seem—similar to the point of having to abide by differing data privacy rules from state-to-state—like there is a burdensome redundancy built in that’s toughest for small businesses to work around. It also seems like federal policymakers could step in to help iron out the differences and ease the burdens for small companies.
Are there any local, state, or federal startup issues that you think should receive more attention from policymakers?
The dropout rates in STEM programs are at an all time high. That is the only discipline group where we have more jobs than we have people ready to take up those jobs. And increasingly, underrepresented students and minority students are being left out of that ecosystem here in the U.S. and around the world. I have done multiple research projects in rural Tennessee, in urban Atlanta, and in rural and urban India. The findings are the same. It is the underrepresented, low-income minority students—who look different in different places—in every single case that get left out of STEM programs. If you layer the gender gap on top of those outcomes, the access discrimination is even more dismal. These days policymakers talk much more about addressing this issue—and that’s necessary. What policymakers and others aren’t often thinking about is that technology can often exacerbate the digital divide and can create more of these opportunity gaps when programs centered around new technologies are not deployed equitably and done in a way that addresses issues of digital literacy. That is something that is central to the mission of Inspirit. We have equity as a key element in what we do and we hope to bring that into the classrooms where we work.
What are your goals for Inspirit moving forward?
For us, the key goal is to reach a point of sustainability from a unit economics perspective. It can get expensive very fast to support and scale up VR deployment in a school given that this is the first time this is happening for most of these institutions. We have to understand that just three years ago, when COVID hit, most schools for the first time experienced video conferencing, a technology that has been around since the early 2000s. And so we're working to provide a technology that leapfrogs a lot of the tools that haven't even made their way into classrooms. The magic is in successful implementation because that translates to a tangible impact on a child’s learning. We know that this will be the best learning experience they have had. In 10 years, everyone's going to be educated using the type of systems we’re building. The question is today, how are we going to be in a place where we can ease the onboarding and provide this opportunity at scale? That’s what we’re looking to solve as our goal.
All of the information in this profile was accurate at the date and time of publication.
Engine works to ensure that policymakers look for insight from the startup ecosystem when they are considering programs and legislation that affect entrepreneurs. Together, our voice is louder and more effective. Many of our lawmakers do not have first-hand experience with the country's thriving startup ecosystem, so it’s our job to amplify that perspective. To nominate a person, company, or organization to be featured in our #StartupsEverywhere series, email advocacy@engine.is.
