Former head of Twitter India wants to end his metaverse lecture in less than six months

• India’s former head Manish Maheshwari and Microsoft’s former executive Tanay Pratap have Invact . set up Metaversity in Dec 2021.
• CEO Maheshwari also acknowledged that both founders had disagreements over the company’s vision.
• The company is currently looking for different ways to run this business, either by returning money from investors or by letting one founder take over.

India’s former head Manish Maheshwari and Microsoft’s former executive Tanay Pratap consider winding down their latest venture Affecting metaversity — a higher education platform established in the metaverse — within six months of launch.

The CEO Maheshwari made this announcement in a series of tweets on May 23, 2022. Maheshwari also acknowledged that both founders had disagreements about the vision of the company. The company is currently exploring multiple operational structures, including reducing cash burn, switching to a different model, acquiring a single founder, or even returning unspent capital to its investors.

“We are now at a crossroads, exploring options such as (a) lowering the burn rate and switching to another idea, (b) having one of the founders take full charge, or (c) unspent capital return to investors,” he added. †

Founded in December 2021, Invact Metaversity announced its first $5 million funding round in February 2022. It was backed by Kishore Biyani of Future Group, former TV executive TV Mohandas Pai of Infosys, and more than 70 world leaders and founders.

How did it work?

Invact Metaversity wanted to launch classes in the metaverse for students seeking higher education.

It wanted to launch its first metaverse teaching experience with a dedicated four-month corporate MBA course for 60 students. The company launched its first cohort a few days ago and has now decided to refund the amount paid by the student.

Under the plan, students would have the option to attend classes through their desktops and mobile phones or have the real-life experience using virtual reality (VR) headsets.

Read more:
INTERVIEW: Former Twitter and Microsoft execs building a classroom on the metaverse explain what it would look and feel like

The vision of Invact Metaversity

Tanay Pratap, founder and chief technology officer (CTO) of vaccinate Metaversity said in an earlier conversation with https://businesstraverse.com/ that the company is trying to solve two problems. First, make online education or distance learning a much more interesting prospect for the students. Second, increase the course completion rate in the online space.

“I think that [Coursera, SkillShare, edX and Udemy and others] are like dinosaurs right now. And in ten years [of launch]the
result in course completion is less than 10%. It just goes to show that although the business model [of these companies] somehow, the end user’s product won’t work. When you sign up for a course, you must complete it. Why would one in ten people complete it,” Pratap added.

He noted that platforms like Coursera, SkillShare, and others will “extinct” over time as the new metaversity learning takes over.

Pratap also noted that the education system is only good for the top 1% of the population, the rest end up spending too much capital and time on insufficient colleges for degrees that don’t offer good opportunities. The company’s vision was to provide hands-on training in the metaverse at a lower cost so that students don’t miss out on the experience of attending offline classes and build a skillset to get better opportunities.


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