Founders: Elise Smith and Heather Shen
Elise has always been inspired by her parents' fight for educational equity. It's driven her to dedicate her career to scaling access and opportunity with the overall goal of creating a more equitable society. Before founding Praxis Labs, Elise worked at the NewSchools Venture Fund, where she invested in and coached entrepreneurs developing diversity and inclusion solutions. While at NewSchools, she was introduced to the power of virtual reality. Elise decided to team up with Heather, a daughter of immigrants who'd worked at NASA dealing with augmented reality pilot training, on creating a company to change workplace culture through using cutting edge technology.
Praxis Labs partners with organizations to increase diversity and inclusion outcomes through research-backed immersive learning experiences. According to Praxis, the perspective-taking in virtual reality can be shown to increase empathy, reduce bias, and encourage the adoption of more inclusive behaviors. Elise and Heather partnered with blue-chip organizations such as eBay, Amazon, Google, and Uber to help develop a VR curriculum that enables employees to experience bias firsthand, as a complicit co-worker, practice responding in the moment, reflect on the incident, and provide anonymous feedback on their experience of inclusion in their workplace. Using the data collected from participating employees, Praxis delivers actionable insights and research-backed interventions to create positive change within the organization.
“We've had folks who have said, ‘I've gone through so many D&I trainings and this is the only one that made me feel something.’ It's not only that they're training, they're showing up differently in their workplace, with their families, with their children. To me, that is the real impact.” - Elise
Sources: Forbes, Q News Hub, Business Wire, Praxis Labs website