Edtech startup Invact Metaversity founders now stand at crossroads after cancelling its first cohort

Invact Metaversity co-founders Manish Maheshwari and Tanay Pratap

After just a few months of raising funds, Invact Metaversity founders Manish Maheswari and Tanay Pratap are now standing at crossroads and exploring ​​possibilities like cutting the burn rate, pivoting or one founder to take full charge or return the unpent capital to its investors, said Maheswari in a series of tweets on May 23. 

The edtech startup cancelled its first cohort earlier this month and has refunded the amount with interest to the students who had enrolled for the course.

Maheswari, who left Twitter to launch this startup, tweeted, “As we started testing the early version of the Metaversity platform with students, it became apparent to us that the immersive classroom and the community experience were not getting delivered at a level that we had envisaged.”

“We also ran into technology and ecosystem challenges as we solved accessibility on devices currently used by students. These started impeding us from delivering a significantly differentiated learning experience at this point in time.”

"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 later added,“I would like to say that we made significant progress in pushing the frontiers on product, technology, curriculum & user experience. But getting it right involves many more things. And getting it right in all aspects on first try is hard. We are humble enough to recognize that.”

This comes a day after Tanay Pratap who has worked as a senior software engineer with Microsoft e-mailed a letter to the investors citing that both the co-founders had a disagreement on long term and short term vision about the startup.

Additionally, the startup was also looking for potential buyers earlier this month but could not find one on the terms and conditions, the letter highlighted.

The startup had raised $5 million  at a valuation of $33 million from Future Group's Kishore Biyani, ex-Infosys director TV Mohandas Pai, Innov8  founder Ritesh Malik and former Facebook MD Kirthiga Reddy among others.

Leaders from global companies such as Microsoft, Facebook parent Meta, Coinbase, Google, Twitter, Uber, Amazon, Softbank, Spotify, GoJek, LinkedIn, and Disney also participated in the funding round.