Visiting the Shark Tank Vietnam TV Show, Nguyen Anh Tuan, the founder and CEO of Elite Meta, impressed the ‘sharks’ with the experience of an online classroom in a metaverse environment.

Tuan said Vietnam spends 5.9 percent of GDP, or $16 billion, on education development each year. With the budget, the startup believes that Vietnam has abundant resources to develop the metaverse in the education sector. 

Tuan said Elite Meta first wants to build virtual spaces for people to learn and work there. The next step would be building virtual schools with functions. In the third step, the startup would build a virtual city that serves education. There would be a market in the city where NFTs would be exchanged.

The startup has worked with universities in Vietnam and foreign countries on using technology in teaching. 

Based on the development plan, the startup wants to receive an investment of $100,000 in exchange for 1 percent of shares.

Asked about turnover, Tuan admitted that the company still cannot make money. However, revenue is expected to come from two sources – leasing of virtual classrooms and profit-sharing with education establishments. 

The CEO said one of the founders of Elite Meta is working at the Accenture technology group (Germany) and has experience in the field of metaverse. The startup believes that it is moving in parallel with Accenture in terms of technology.

Shark Binh (Nguyen Hoa Binh, president of NextTech Group) said Elite Meta is trying to catch the trend and that the metaverse trend is just an ‘artificial fever’ which complicates a simple issue and won’t bring value to users.

In reply, Tuan said that his startup as well as many companies in the world are pouring tens of billions of dollars into the metarverse.

“Not to mention whether the metaverse is right or wrong, but without dreams, society will not be able to develop. I once owned a company with turnover of VND100 billion a year, but am willing to sacrifice this to pursue my dreams," said Tuan.

Having an interest and deep knowledge about technology products, Shark Erik (Erik Jonsson, the partner managing the Antler investment venture fund, said there are many more things that Elite Meta needs to do to perfect its business model. 

The foreign shark at Shark Tank, however, thought that it was an interesting product. Finally, the two sides agreed on investment capital of $100,000 in exchange for 10 percent of shares.

Trong Dat