He builds places you can walk into. A chemistry reaction, a beating heart, a moon landing - rendered as somewhere a student can stand. The catch: it runs just as well on a $200 Chromebook as a VR headset.
Most edtech founders start with the technology and go looking for a classroom. Aditya Vishwanath did it backwards. He sat in classrooms first, watched what learning actually felt like, and only then asked what a headset could do about it. The result is Inspirit - a virtual and augmented reality platform for middle and high school STEM, used in hundreds of districts across the United States and beyond.
The company sells immersion without the usual price of admission. A biology unit, a physics simulation, a virtual field trip to somewhere a school bus could never reach. Crucially, none of it demands a closet full of expensive goggles. Inspirit runs on the VR hardware a district already owns, or simply in a browser tab on a Chromebook. That single design decision - meet schools where they are - is the quiet reason it spread.
Vishwanath is co-founder and CEO. He is also, by training, a learning scientist with a Stanford Ph.D., which means he can argue with you about pedagogy and rendering pipelines in the same breath.
Role: Co-Founder & CEO, Inspirit
Based: Palo Alto, California
From: Chennai, India
Studied: Georgia Tech (CS), Stanford (Ph.D. Learning Sciences)
Also built: MakerGhat, makerspaces in Mumbai
Funding raised: ~$7.3M for Inspirit
"Learning is an experience of building curiosity and wonder."
- Aditya VishwanathAround 2016, Vishwanath was doing classroom research in Atlanta when a sixth-grade student pressed a Google Cardboard into his hands. A folded piece of cardboard and a phone. That was the spark. Not a venture deck, not a conference keynote - a kid showing a researcher something the researcher hadn't thought to try.
He carried the idea into Google's education team, where he worked on putting low-cost VR into curricula. There he saw the failure mode up close: companies and districts dropping new tools into classrooms like a cool new hammer, with teachers never once in the room. Technology arriving as a solution to a problem no teacher had named.
So he and a college friend, Amrutha Vasan, made a decision that is rare among founders: they waited. They saw the market years before they moved. When COVID-19 emptied classrooms and made immersive, remote learning suddenly urgent, they launched Inspirit. Patience, then timing.
At Stanford's Graduate School of Education, Vishwanath studied learning science and technology design under two of the field's heavyweights - Roy Pea and Jeremy Bailenson, the latter a founding name in virtual reality research. He won a seed grant to design Virtual Field Trips, then built his doctoral research around them.
That research is not a footnote to Inspirit. It is the spine. The lessons are aligned to Common Core and Next Generation Science Standards, and the product is sold on evidence rather than novelty. In a market crowded with shiny demos, Vishwanath's pitch is almost contrarian: prove the learning, then talk about the hardware.
A teacher in Washington reported that bottom-quartile students, using Inspirit just two or three times a month, showed lasting gains in participation and a new sense of agency. That is the metric he cares about - not headset minutes, but whether a quiet kid raises a hand.
Long before virtual reality, Vishwanath was building the physical kind. MakerGhat began as a makerspace and incubator for young people in low-income neighborhoods of Mumbai - workbenches, tools, mentorship, a place to make things with your hands. It has since grown into a network reaching over 10,000 schools across India. There is a through-line here worth noticing: whether the material is plywood or a polygon mesh, the project is the same. Give a student a place to build, and let curiosity do the rest.
He collects fellowships the way some founders collect logos. Each one is a different institution betting that a learning scientist who can ship code is worth backing.
"Entrepreneurship is painful, hard, and I don't recommend it. But if you truly care about a problem, it is one of the most powerful ways to have an impact."
- Aditya Vishwanath, advice he gives anywayVishwanath's stated ambition is not to sell more headsets. It is to make XR a fundamental way kids build scientific thinking - as unremarkable in a classroom as a whiteboard. He talks about education shifting toward the personalized and experiential, with students holding more agency over how they learn.
Lately he has turned some of that energy outward, serving as a hub mentor at Stanford's Education Entrepreneurship Hub, coaching the next wave of founders to do what he did: start with the learner, not the gadget. He still shows up on stage at gatherings like the Future of Education Technology Conference.
The bet underneath all of it is simple and stubborn. If you build a place worth standing in, a student will be curious enough to walk in. The rest is engineering.
"Technologies like VR and AR will play an outsized role in increasing immersive, personalized, and experiential learning."