IIM Ahmedabad hosts Springboard founder Parul Gupta

Entre, IIM Ahmedabad’s entrepreneurship club, and Centre for Innovation, Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE) organised a speaker session by Parul Gupta, co-founder of Springboard, an education technology (EdTech) start-up based out of Silicon Valley in the US. The session was a part of HTSAS 3.0 speaker series hosted by Entre and CIIE.

With a Bachelor’s degree from IIT Bombay and a Masters in Electronics, Gupta completed Communication Engineering at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) following which she worked in IBM for a while. A few years later, she quit her job and founded Springboard. When asked about why she chose this space to establish her start-up, she said: “I realised that there was a big gap in the EdTech market because it is difficult for people to find the right learning courses that would fit their needs. That’s when I decided to come up with an online course discovery platform. We were very clear from the beginning that content alone is not education.” Springboard builds a complete curriculum based on users’ needs. Its programmes are targeted towards specific skills.

An important feature of Springboard is the mentorship programme embedded in their courses and the assistance it provides by listing job opportunities after the completion of the course. The mentorship programme allows users to have one-on-one interactions with mentors. One-third of the course fee goes to mentorship services.

Presently, Springboard has about 50 employees. It recently raised $9 million in funding, which it plans to use in rapid expansion of the business. Talking about the future of the company, Gupta said: “I have a few ideas on integrating learning with Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR). Virtual classrooms that could provide live interactions will provide a good focussed learning experience to users. That’s one area we would like to work on in future.”