A 24-inch screen
changed the classroom
In San Jose's Gateway Place office park, Paul Kellenberger runs a company with over 70 patents in augmented and virtual reality - and he will be the first to tell you that nobody in his schools is wearing a headset. The zSpace system is a 3D display, a haptic stylus, and a pair of lightweight tracking glasses. Students reach into the screen and pull out a virtual human heart. They weld a joint in a simulated shop environment. They dissect a frog without formaldehyde and explore the surface of Mars without a rocket. The classroom does not look like a sci-fi movie. It looks like a computer lab - which is exactly the point.
Kellenberger came to zSpace (then called Infinite Z) after stints running Motorola's technology divisions in the mid-1990s, a VP role at InaCom during the chaotic peak of the PC era, and a CEO position at Chancery Software, which he profitably grew until Pearson acquired it. His MBA from McMaster University in finance and marketing gives him a particular kind of fluency: he speaks revenue before he speaks product, and that combination has shaped how zSpace pitches its education technology - not on wonder, but on outcome.
The outcome argument runs like this: North Carolina State University studied students using zSpace versus traditional instruction and found a 40 percent better retention rate. That number travels. When Kellenberger walks into a school district budget meeting or a CTE coordinator's office, he does not lead with the frog. He leads with the number. The frog is the demo. The number is the door.
That instinct - evidence first, experience second - has guided zSpace's expansion into career technical education. Two years before Kellenberger began publicly discussing CTE, the company had zero revenue in that segment. As of his most recent statements, it represents half of the company's entire pipeline. That is not a feature rollout. That is a market pivot executed inside a single product's lifetime.
The CTE move is strategic in a way that pure edtech rarely gets to be. Schools face a documented workforce gap: students graduate without the hands-on skills that manufacturing, healthcare, and engineering employers actually need. zSpace puts a virtual welding torch, a simulated surgical suite, and an interactive circuit board in a classroom that previously had none of that equipment. The argument to administrators is cheaper than the equipment, safer than the reality, and measurably more effective. Kellenberger has been refining that argument for years.
In December 2024, zSpace went public on Nasdaq under the ticker ZSPC, pricing its shares at $5.00. The IPO raised $9.4 million - a modest raise, but a real milestone for a company that began its life backed by In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture arm. The original government-adjacent vision for the technology involved defense and intelligence visualization. The technology found its calling in a seventh-grade science class instead.
Kellenberger's 2025 consisted of two acquisitions: BlocksCAD, a browser-based 3D modeling and coding platform, in March, and Second Avenue Learning in April, a company focused on experiential education content. The pattern is familiar for any operator who has scaled a platform: buy what fills the gap you cannot build fast enough. With zSpace's hardware established in thousands of classrooms, the missing piece was deeper, richer content - and the acquisitions address exactly that.
Early 2026 brought a rougher stretch. The stock dropped from its IPO price, and Nasdaq issued a warning about the company's market valuation falling below the $35 million minimum. In January 2026, zSpace secured a $3 million strategic investment from Planet One Education - a convertible preferred stock arrangement designed to strengthen the balance sheet and fund international expansion. The company's reach already extends to roughly 1,000 Chinese school systems, and the international push is deliberate: the workforce development problem that zSpace solves is not uniquely American.
Kellenberger describes the current trajectory with calibrated optimism. "Early indicators we are seeing, modest improvement in customer additions, and steady software renewals give us reasonable confidence that the underlying business is on firmer footing." That is CEO-speak for: we are not done, the product still works, and the mission still matters. It is also probably accurate.
He notes something specific about student adoption that gets overlooked in most ed-tech conversations: kids adapt to the interface with unnerving speed. There is no learning curve that adults would recognize. The stylus is natural. The 3D tracking is intuitive. The gap between "new tool" and "just how things work" closes in minutes, not weeks. Kellenberger attributes this to the same generation-wide comfort with digital interaction that every tech educator references - but the zSpace evidence is a little different, because the interface has real spatial weight. It is not swiping. It is reaching.
The Gartner "Cool Vendor" designation, the three consecutive Tech & Learning "Best in Show at ISTE" awards, the 2025 Award of Excellence for zSpace Career Explorer - these are not accidents. They reflect a company that has been consistent about what it builds and disciplined about how it positions that product. Kellenberger's background in corporate development at companies where speed and precision mattered - Motorola, DEC, InaCom - shows in how zSpace goes to market: clear value proposition, evidence-backed claims, and a sales motion that targets the decision-maker with the data they actually need.
The aspiration is straightforward and genuinely ambitious: bring zSpace into the mainstream of American (and eventually global) education. Not as a novelty, not as a special program, but as infrastructure - as standard as a projector, as expected as a computer lab. Whether the current financial headwinds slow that trajectory or merely bend it remains to be seen. But the direction has been consistent since Kellenberger took the wheel.
