Role
Co-founder & CEO
Venture · Co-founder & CEO · 2023
GoPal
I co-founded and led GoPal, an EdTech venture designed to let people learn by exploring places and situations they could not easily access in real life. In 2023, DIFC selected us for its inaugural Metaverse Accelerator Programme in Dubai.
Meet Daria Antonova, Co-founder & CEO of GoPalDIFC Innovation Hub · June 2023 ↗ The 2023 DIFC programme material identifies Dasha as Daria Antonova.
The work
What I owned
I led product direction, positioning, the business model, financial planning and accelerator materials, including the application, pitch and partner conversations.
The call I made
Each new learning environment took time to produce. Building the range of experiences we wanted for GoPal would have taken too long.
We decided to start with something simpler and wait for the technology to develop. I expected AI to make creating these experiences easier.
DIFC accelerator context
The DIFC Metaverse Platform was endorsed by Dubai's Higher Committee for Future Technology and Digital Economy.
Programme context
Dubai's wider Metaverse Strategy set citywide targets of $4bn added to GDP, 40,000 virtual jobs by 2030, and 1,000 metaverse and blockchain companies; GoPal was one of the startups selected for DIFC's accelerator under that programme.
Bringing interactive learning to more people.
Going down a mine shaft. Reading gas levels before the air goes bad. Putting noise barriers around workers on a factory floor. Flying cargo to people who need it. Looking inside a human body. Following a pilgrimage route on the other side of the world.
Some of these experiences are difficult to practise safely; others let people explore places they cannot easily reach.
The studio was already producing this kind of interactive learning for corporations and institutions. I partnered with them to build GoPal: an educational platform in the metaverse.
We built three navigable environments inside existing metaverse platforms to understand what the learning experience needed and how it should work.
The public record
DIFC Marks Next Step in MEA Metaverse Development GoPal, a metaverse-based edtech platform
