Wrapping Up With Izzy Ngo @ Vere360
I got the chance to sit in with Isobel “Izzy” Ngo and discuss what she’s been working on at her startup. Izzy Ngo is the co-founder of VERE360 and an ed-tech entrepreneur for Southeast Asia, who’s deeply passionate about democratizing quality educational resources through technology. She has received her education from Yale-NUS College and INSEAD, and has worked in two Indonesian startups, McKinsey & Company, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), and JD.id.
Pain Points:
From lab experiments to field trips, experiential learning has been a key facet of education that has become restricted due to COVID-19, which forced mass school closures around the world. Yet, it has also been a problem for teachers before the pandemic. Experiential learning is expensive for schools and time intensive for teachers, and it’s not scalable for students.
Market Size:
For the near future, we are focusing on Southeast Asia as our target market, specifically Singapore, Indonesia, and the Philippines. The total market value of these three countries is SGD 4.4B.
Product:
We offer a Virtual Reality educational platform and content for K-12 schools that allow teachers to integrate their existing slides with a library of relevant, immersive content in an interface similar to PowerPoint. Using web and mobile apps, teachers can share their content with students from anywhere around the world with no additional hardware. At VERE360, we are bringing experiential learning online to make it affordable, scalable, and teacher-friendly.
Team:
I co-founded VERE360 in 2018 with Adila Sayyed while we were pursuing our studies (anthropology and history) at Yale-NUS College. Since then, the team has welcomed five dedicated individuals with backgrounds in psychology and AR/VR/XR and a wonderful team of advisors who have expertise in education, edtech, finance, and child psychology.
Latest Breakthrough:
Teaching — coming up with lesson plans that speak to students — is a creative craft. While time-saving and educational efficacy are top-of-mind for teachers when deciding platforms, they ultimately look for tools that heighten their craft and feed into the narrative that they have developed. This shift in understanding has redefined how we design our platform, our VR content, and how we engage teachers; it’s a shift in understanding that moves away from developing tools that replace teachers to a mindset of developing tools to empower them.
Recent Shortcomings:
Not realizing the “latest breakthrough” earlier.
Founder Wisdom:
The tools and applications for education should be as varied and personalizable as those in healthcare. Both education and healthcare are arguably public goods and definitely necessities in society that feel distinctly human. However, technologies that augment and measure healthcare have skyrocketed, leaving education behind with archaic delivery methods and models of measurement. Until we broaden our collective understanding of what constitutes as “good” education, this will continue to be the case.
What 3 founders should we know about?
Angela Chen and Aurelien Chu, Founders of Eskwelabs: Eskwelabs is reimagining the vocational school. Our mission is to democratize access to the future of work for those from diverse backgrounds through data skills.
Jamie Tan, Founder of Flying Cape Technologies: Flying Cape Technologies believes true learning happens when it is delivered in a personalized way that caters to an individual’s unique learning styles. Working with esteemed academics and education leaders, we have built a global ecosystem powered by validated research, data and analytics to pave the way for the future of learning.
Chongming Ng, Co-Founder of Practicle: Practicle is an AI adaptive technology for education. We help to identify the learning gaps of children and close them through a personalized and gamified approach. We work with tuition centres and schools to help automate their work processes so that they can easily teach at their maximum efficiency.
