Inspirit, an education technology startup founded by two Georgia Institute of Technology graduates, raised a $3 million funding round, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Silicon Valley investor Sierra Ventures led the round, with participation from AME Cloud Ventures, according to Amrutha Vasan, Inspirit's chief operations officer.
Inspirit, which launched in 2019 and is co-founded by Vasan and chief executive officer Aditya Vishwanath, provides immersive products in the science technology, engineering and math (STEM) field for middle and high school students.
“Right now, the way STEM is taught is mostly through textbooks or online videos,” Vasan said. “A lot of STEM learning is inherently experiential. Students tend to lose interest in STEM after the age of 10 or 11 because the topics they start learning become a lot more abstract.”
Inspirit has digital labs, simulations and virtual reality capabilities in order to make STEM learning more experiential and accessible to students.
The platform is currently in private beta mode, Vasan said, and is set to launch publicly later this year. People interested in trying the product can sign up for Inspirit’s waitlist, Vasan said.
There are currently about 2,500 teachers using the platform with their students. Vasan said the move to virtual learning for the Covid-19 pandemic sped up adoption of the platform as teachers look for digital solutions to supplement their lessons.
With increased interest in the platform over 2020, Vasan said the company expanded to about 20 employees, all of whom work remotely and are mostly based in India.
“We already had a remote team before Covid,” Vasan said. “My co-founder and I are used to working in different time zones, and it’s been really good because we’ve gotten insight on a lot of different markets.”
Vasan said the company is mostly finished with hiring and now focuses on getting the platform ready for the public launch by working with teachers and internally testing the product.
The company kicked into gear after the founders raised a $300,000 pre-seed round led by Silicon Valley's Unshackled Ventures in 2019, which is when Vasan said they started working on Inspirit full time.
Inspirit is based on the skills that Vasan and Vishwanath learned at Georgia Tech.
“We were both part of the human computer interaction department, where we did a lot of research in immersive education,” Vasan said.
Vishwanath then entered a Ph.D. program at Stanford University, where he continued the same research track. Vasan stayed in Atlanta, which she said was helpful because the founders spent a lot of time in public school classrooms in Cobb and Fulton counties to understand the problems teachers face.
As recent Georgia Tech graduates, Vasan said her and Vishwanath’s strategy has been to surround themselves with experienced developers and leaders in the education technology space to build the best product possible.
