By Sundaram Mishra
WESTON, MA—Kipin Hall,award-winning platform that makes it easier for professors to communicate with students and vice versa, has another achievement to add to its long list. They have been named semi-finalists at the ongoing $5 million Robin Hood Foundation Education Competition.
Being a semi-finalist, this means that Kipin Hall will receive an additional $40,000 in grants that will be used to improve the education platform, company officials said.
Kipin Hall was founded by New York University student and developer Abhi Ashutosh in the summer of 2013 with Sai Yerram and Kranthi Pinjala. Technology is life for Ashutosh, a native of Weston, MA, and a rising junior at New York University who is studying computer science with minors in business and math.
Ashutosh said that he and his colleagues founded Kipin Hall “to solve the issue of adherence and retention in lower-end higher education schools (universities and colleges).”
A beta was launched in autumn of 2013, with 1,000 users and 12 professors, and in February of 2014 Kipin Hall officially launched with 60,000 current students using it. Since Kipin Hall’s launch the platform has won the 2014 NYU Entrepreneur’s Festival Pitch Competition and the Spring 2014 NYU Founders Forum Pitch competition. They were also semi-finalists in 2014 Milken-Penn GSE Education Business Plan Competition and have been featured in Forbes magazine.
On top of Kipin Hall, Ashutosh has also created a calendar app called Caleido. He made this app in his dorm room his freshman year at NYU, after being constantly disappointed with other calendar apps on iOS. Caleido currently has 350,000 downloads and has been featured in Techcrunch as well as Apple in their “New and Noteworthy,” “Apps for Your New iPhone,” and “Best New Apps” sections in over 30 countries.
Ashutosh is also the president of TEDxNYU and is on the boards of HashtagNYU and Tech@NYU.
