Former Twitter India head is looking to wind down his metaverse college in less than six months

• Twitter India’s former head Manish Maheshwari and Microsoft’s former executive Tanay Pratap founded Invact Metaversity in December 2021.
• CEO Maheshwari also acknowledged that both the founders had differences over the vision of the company.
• The company is currently looking for different modes to run this company, either by returning investors’ money or letting one founder take over.

Twitter India’s former head Manish Maheshwari and Microsoft’s former executive Tanay Pratap are considering winding down their latest venture Invact Metaversity — a higher education platform set up in the metaverse — within six months of its launch.

Its CEO Maheshwari made this announcement in a series of tweets on May 23, 2022. Maheshwari also acknowledged that both the founders had differences over the vision of the company. The company is currently exploring multiple operational structures including cutting cash burn, pivoting to another model, letting one founder takeover or even returning unspent capital back to its investors.

“We are now standing at crossroads exploring possibilities such as (a) cutting the burn rate and pivoting to another idea, (b) letting one of the founders take full charge, or (c) returning the unspent capital to investors,” he added.

Invact Metaversity was founded in December 2021 and announced its first funding round of $5 million earlier in February 2022. It was backed by Future Group’s Kishore Biyani, Infosys’ former executive TV Mohandas Pai, and over 70 top global leaders and founders.

How did it work?

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

It was looking to launch its first metaverse education experience with a special four month business foundation MBA course for 60 students. The company launched its first cohort a few days back, and has now decided to return any fee paid by the student.

As per the plan, students would have the option to attend the classes through their desktops and mobiles or have the real experience with the help of 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 Invact Metaversity, in a previous conversation with Business Insider said that the company is trying to solve two problems. First, make online education or remote learning a much more interesting prospect for the students. Secondly, ensure that the course completion rate increases in the online space.

“I think those [Coursera, SkillShare, edX and Udemy and others] are like dinosaurs right now. And in ten years [of launch], the outcome in course completion is less than 10%. It just shows that even though the business model [of these companies] is working somehow, the end user's product is not working. If you sign up for a course, you need to complete it. Why would one out of ten people complete it,” Pratap added.

He noted that platforms like Coursera, SkillShare and others will go “extinct” in some time as the new mode of learning in the metaversity 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 subpar colleges for degrees that do not fetch good opportunities. The company’s vision was to offer hands-on training in the metaverse at cheaper 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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