A Paradigm Shift in Education!

Paradigm Shift was recently selected by noted venture capitalist Tim Draper as the best VR idea and has raised funding from Boost VC in California!

The CEO- Dhruv Washishth is also a fellow of the prestigious London based Royal Society of Arts.
“After my first venture CheersMate.in, I wanted to work on something more impactful and had a keen interest to change the education sector. It has been a stagnant industry which needs to be disrupted. In Silicon Valley I first experienced virtual reality (VR) and during a hackathon, I was able to connect the dots between education and VR. There the idea to start off Paradigm Shift was born,” Co-founder and CEO Dhruv Washishth, who started the company a year ago, tells me.

The startup uses VR and augmented reality (AR) technologies to make education a lot more interactive, engaging and fun. Paradigm Shift is working on an Android-based VR app which is a key component of its tool.

“You download the app on your phone, place the handset inside a Google Cardboard and start learning. Imagine learning Chemistry and Physics or even the planetary system by looking and interacting with the material rather than just reading from books,” he says.

Paradigm Shift was recently selected by noted venture capitalist Tim Draper as the best VR idea. It also won the overall championship at a competition at Draper University in San Francisco. The startup was also picked by Boost VC for its accelerator programme in Silicon Valley and received an undisclosed amount in pre-seed funding.

Washishth claims that his startup is already getting interests from different universities. “We have had interest from my alma mater Christ University in Bangalore to collaborate with us. We are also having discussions with AltSchool in San Francisco, Stanford University and University of Colorado. We plan to tie up with various institutions to take the product forward and make learning fun for students rather than something they dread.”

As of now, the learning content is prepared in-house. Going forward, the startup plans to rope in professors from noted universities to prepare the education content.

The company follows a subscription model, where it charges US$20 per student per year. Its initial target markets are the US and India.

According to Paradigm Shift, there is a huge scope for the product and that Indian educational institutions are willing to adopt it. “Not everyone knows about the possible applications of our product just yet, but there is a huge scope, especially with affordable hardware such as the Google cardboard being available,” Washishth notes.

Washishth has long been deeply involved with the startup ecosystem in India, spearheading new initiatives at The Indus Entrepreneurs, (TiE) Bangalore, launching AngelHack in India, and building Startup Festival, a leading startup event in Bangalore.

“On the personal front, I have varied interests. I have been very interested in the world of venture capital and have been studying about it and talking to very interesting people in the valley regarding it, especially in the Impact investing space,” he says.

Paradigm Shift is a Virtual and Augmented Reality startup focused on Education

Paradigm Shift
55 E 3rd Ave,
San Mateo
California

This release was published on openPR.