IIM-A conducts talk session with founder Parul Gupta

Hyderabad: Entre, the entrepreneurship club and Centre for Innovation, Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE) of IIM Ahmedabad organised a speaker session by Parul Gupta, a co-founder of ‘Springboard’, which is an Education Technology (EdTech) start up based out of Silicon Valley in US. The session was a part of HTSAS 3.0 speaker series by Entre and CIIE.

Having completed her Bachelor’s degree at IIT Bombay and did her Masters in Electronics, she went on to complete her Communication Engineering at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She worked in IBM for some years, after which she quit her job and founded Springboard, an EdTech start up. When asked about why she chose this space to establish her start up, she replied “I realized that there was a big gap in the EdTech market because it is difficult for people to find the right learning courses that would fit their needs. 

That’s when I decided to come up with an ‘online course discovery platform’. We were very clear from the beginning that content alone is not education.” Springboard builds a complete curriculum based on users’ needs. Its programs are targeted towards specific skills. One important feature of Springboard is the mentorship program embedded in their courses and also the assistance in job opportunities after the course completion. The mentorship program allows users have one-on-one interactions with mentors, who are experts in their respective domains. One-third of the course fee goes to mentorship services. Hence, being a mentor is also seen as a revenue source by some, while others mentor part time.

Springboard presently has about 50 employees and is growing. Recently, the firm raised $9 mn funding, which the firm is planning to use in rapid expansion of the business. Talking about the future of the company, Parul Gupta said “I have a few ideas on integrating learning with Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR). Virtual classrooms that could provide live interactions will provide a good focussed learning experience to users. That’s one area we would like to work on in future.”