Parth Arora doesn’t yet have his college diploma. But he does have something that most entrepreneurs envy: A successful startup exit.
Arora founded the fitness app Third Dimension Fitness as a student in Georgia Tech’s undergraduate computer science department. The virtual reality (VR) and mixed reality startup is built to turn a boring cardio workout on stationary bikes, treadmills, and ellipticals into dynamic adventures. Using Meta Quest’s glasses, the startup helps gamify a person’s fitness journey through story-based workouts.
Last week, Arora announced that Third Dimension was acquired by Elbo, a Singapore-based education-focused company. Financial details about the acquisition were not disclosed.
Arora started his first company, an EdTech platform called Kidea, at the age of 16 in his home country of India. He ultimately shut the business down as he couldn’t find a viable business model that could make a difference while making money while he started at Georgia Tech in 2021. But Arora quickly found himself engrossed in the virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) space. He worked at the seed-stage startup WalkThru Virtual Reality and ZenVR, a Georgia Tech-born app that uses virtual reality to teach meditation.
Told Hypepotamus he was attracted to the VR space because “as a builder, the options are limitless. It’s a perfect intersection of graphics, technology, and the unknowns because it is such a new field.”
Last year, Arora started monetizing the app after seeing strong organic downloads from across the world. It has been profitable ever since.
What’s Next After Third Dimension Fitness?
Arora admits that the process of building Third Dimension Fitness while balancing a full college schedule was difficult.
“60 percent of my time was in this company, 40 percent from academics. Everything else was cut off,” he told Hypepotamus. After securing an internship with Apple’s Vision Pro Real Time Software Engineering team for this upcoming summer, he knew it was time to start finding a new owner for Third Dimension.
He credits the Georgia Tech ecosystem — including the Create-X program — for its help in building the company. Arora said that he did not have to spend a single dollar of his own money to build the startup, thanks to grants, fellowships, and awards across the university and the Oculus Start Program.
“I knew acquisition was the goal for the company. We had a lot of good content and good generative AI tools. I knew could benefit someone a lot and could save them hundreds of thousands of dollars in development cycles,” he told Hypepotamus.
Arora said he is excited about the future of VR as headsets and glasses become more robust for daily use. But first, he’ll focus on finishing his degree…which he’s set to receive in December.
