VBoard - Orange Fab startups that supports online education

VBoard, that joined the Orange Fab program at the end of 2021, is a startup from Timișoara that offers access to education in a very easy way, to eliminate distances between the teachers and their students.

The product is an interactive virtual whiteboard explicitly built for online teaching. The VBoard provides real-time communication between teachers and groups of students, both through the board and the audio-video module included in it.

Launched completely for free during the pandemic to support the difficult educational situation, the product reached over 37.000 registered users. Once the lockdown ended, due to the continued demand for online teaching, VBoard introduced paid subscriptions on top of the freemium model, that lead to the first paying customers.

The platform was built with the teachers who use it every day and is easy to use, adapted for phones and tablets, offering a variety of unique features to facilitate collaboration between a teacher and small groups of students. In addition, with multiple integrations with online teaching platforms, Vboard is very easy to integrate into most schools.

Further on, we learn from Marius Mazilu, VBoard founder, about the team's journey and what they plan to do next.

How VBoard became part of Orange Fab

We participated in the Innovation Labs pre-accelerator and in the final Demo Day we were designated Best Scale-up by the expert jury and we also won the special Orange prize. We kept in contact with the Orange Fab team and further on we were admitted in the Orange Fab program as well.

The team behind the startup

The team is still forming. I had Lucian Dărăbuș with me, who played a crucial role in interacting with the Innovation Labs pre-accelerator and Microsoft through the Microsoft for Startups program.

I also had the support of a group of professors who guided me in implementing the critical functionality that made VBoard a success. I want to mention Daniela Rezmive and Marius Lobază, who were the most significant contributors.

What are the ambitions of the VBoard product and how does it differentiate from existing solutions?

The product is a virtual whiteboard explicitly built for the field of education. Most of the existing boards have been brought from the business area and adapted for the educational environment. This whiteboard was built from the beginning to address educational needs.

Thus, VBoard is the only platform that offers special rulings for the early years' education in Romania. It also offers the "Individual boards" functionality, that offers an unique online teaching experience which allows the teacher to see simultaneously, in real-time, the activity of all their students - as well as the ability to interact with them.

We have functionalities built for teaching in schools, as well as any others type of online training.

What are VBoard's future plans?

We are looking to expand VBoard internationally. For example, we are in discussions with an American company for a partnership in the United States explicitly targeting online teaching. At the same time, we continue to improve the VBoard solution with the feedback we constantly receive from teachers.

Find out more about VBoard from the ZF Tech Day show (a discussion in Romanian):