Subbu Viswanathan and the education of a second chance

By the time Subbu Viswanathan and Kuljit Chadha considered going back to ordinary jobs, they had already spent years trying to make a different sort of classroom. Their venture had technology, recognition and a product they believed in. It had also delivered the expensive education that comes with discovering how difficult a customer can be to reach. A return to employment was on the table. Then a well-wisher in private equity urged them to try again.

They did. The partnership stayed; the classroom changed. The next business would help people learn at work. It began as Learntron in 2015 and became Disprz. In August 2023, when the company announced a $30 million Series C, Viswanathan looked back at the earlier struggle with unusual directness. Success had taken a less obliging route than the one a pitch deck might draw.

“I never regret starting up and struggling,” he wrote. There is affection in that sentence, and a small qualification in the larger account: he would repeat the experience with more judgement. Experience, apparently, earns the right to suggest edits.

The company before the company

Viswanathan’s professional story reaches further back than Disprz. He studied mechanical engineering at IIT Madras, then business at the Indian School of Business. Manufacturing software was an early interest. Fruition Morgensoft, started in 2004, built enterprise resource planning software for smaller manufacturers in India. The company was acquired by 3i Infotech in 2007 for a reported $1 million.

That is an instructive first customer: a manufacturer has processes, inventory and orders that must survive contact with the actual factory. Software has to fit the operation. Elegance alone cannot persuade a production schedule to cooperate.

A period at McKinsey in London followed. Consulting provided a view of established organizations; the wish to build another product remained. In August 2011, he returned to entrepreneurship and began working with Chadha on Harness. The emerging tablet offered a tempting possibility: a classroom in which teachers and students could share digital work rather than merely watch a screen at the front.

The concept linked handwriting, collaboration and the teacher’s view of what was happening across the class. It asked a device to change an everyday ritual. As a product proposition, that had appeal. As a business, it required schools to purchase and adopt something unfamiliar. Those are separate examinations, and the marks do not always travel together.

A customer is part of the invention

Harness struggled to scale. In Viswanathan’s account, investors admired the product but the next substantial cheque did not arrive. A UK private-equity investor acquired the venture in 2015. He and Chadha then redirected their attention to employers, where learning still offered plenty of room for better technology.

The shift carried a practical insight. An invention includes the circumstances in which somebody will pay for it and keep using it. The audience is part of the design problem. Changing from students to workers required the founders to reconsider the buyer, the setting and the meaning of progress.

Design also meant asking for help. Devanshu, a co-founder of the design studio Onething, remembered contacting Viswanathan after reading about Learntron’s seed funding. Viswanathan replied. Discussions followed, and the young studio won its first professional customer. For an engineer building enterprise software, treating design as an early expense was a revealing choice. A product could be technically sound and still leave its user wondering where to click.

The name changed too. Learntron became Disprz in 2017. The new name suited the ambition to reach a workforce spread across locations. It also loosened the association with the dutiful, occasionally dreary experience people had come to expect from corporate training.

The test after the lesson

In Viswanathan’s thinking, the useful unit of workplace learning is a skill connected to a job. Start with what the role requires. Establish what the employee can already do. Help close the gap. Then look for a change in performance. That sequence gives a training programme something more demanding to answer for than a completed attendance list.

In his 2022 account of Disprz, he described linking learning with business results and supporting both frontline employees and knowledge workers. The distinction matters. A person moving between deliveries has a different working day from someone whose main tool is a laptop. A platform intended for both has to accommodate the difference.

The argument is easy to agree with in a meeting. Putting it into software is less tidy. Job requirements need to be expressed clearly enough to assess. Recommendations need to be relevant enough to use. Managers need a reason to care after the launch presentation has disappeared from everyone’s inbox.

His discussion with podcast host Ryan Staley extended skills-based thinking into recruitment, performance reviews and succession planning. The attraction is a common language. If an organization can describe capability consistently, learning becomes connected to decisions about who does what next. A course catalogue alone cannot make those decisions intelligible.

That is also why the business spans products suited to customers at different levels of digital maturity. Some organizations need the foundations of managing learning. Others want a more individualized experience. Selling the same future to everyone would be convenient for the seller, though perhaps less convenient for everyone else.

A bigger cheque, a wider map

The Series C announced in August 2023 supplied a dated measure of the company’s progress. Lumos Capital Group and 360 ONE Asset led the $30 million round, with participation from existing investors. Disprz said it served nearly 350 organizations and 2.8 million users. These were company figures at that moment, a snapshot rather than a permanently updating scoreboard.

Viswanathan attached a larger ambition to the announcement: a profitable $100 million company in the next four to five years. The combination is worth noticing. Revenue supplied the scale; profitability supplied the condition. It was a statement about where he wanted to arrive, with the work of getting there still ahead.

International expansion had already become part of the operating plan. In a 2023 conversation about Saudi Arabia, he described a customer base that included NEOM, SRMG and Tawuniya Insurance, and an intention to deepen the company’s presence there. The regional focus made the global ambition concrete: particular customers, particular markets, and more work to earn.

For a company concerned with a dispersed workforce, geography enters the product as well as the sales plan. An employer’s people may work in different places and different roles. The learning proposition has to make sense where they are. A map with pins is the easy graphic; a useful experience for the person behind each pin takes longer.

The founder changes, too

In September 2024, Viswanathan published an essay about four kinds of founder motivation: profit, purpose, solving a problem and creating products. He recognized himself in the product innovator. New technology continued to excite him. Over time, he wrote, purpose had become a stronger part of what drove him.

His description of building with Chadha was especially revealing. Working with good-hearted people and enjoying the act of making things belonged near the beginning of their shared purpose. The problem they chose to tackle mattered, but so did the company they would keep while tackling it.

He advised co-founders to agree on their underlying purpose while bringing complementary strengths to the work. Read beside his own career, the argument has some weight. He and Chadha had already changed businesses together. Shared motivation had survived a demanding practical test.

“I began my journey as a product innovator.”Subbu Viswanathan, 2024

His present company’s mission connects advancement at work with advancement in life. That gives the language of skills a personal consequence. A capability can mean a better chance at a different role. For the founder, the interesting question becomes whether the machinery of enterprise software can make that chance available to more people.

A rehearsal before the real conversation

By the PLAN 25 programme, Viswanathan was discussing generative AI for content, assessments, search and recommendations. The agenda paired new technology with familiar constraints: time, cost and relevance. A more elaborate system still needs to help someone do something useful sooner.

His later public writing about coaching narrows the question further. A manager has limited time to practise with a whole team. Employees whose jobs depend on conversations need opportunities to rehearse before facing a customer. He describes AI roleplay and feedback as ways to widen access to that practice.

There are other conversations too. In July 2025, he joined HR leader and tennis player Akbar Khan for an episode of Humanly Speaking about lessons sport offers business and learning. The subject suits a founder whose work keeps returning to improvement: repetition, judgement, the next attempt.

In 2026, Disprz publicly reported winning the Talent track at Accenture’s Tech Next Challenge. Recognition adds another marker to the company’s route. The more absorbing continuity is the question underneath it: how do people get better at what they do? Viswanathan has carried it through classrooms, workplaces and several versions of a company. He has also had occasion to apply it to himself.