Deepak Patel, an engineer who immigrated to the U.S. and grew up on food stamps, built Zeality to add spatial depth to social media beyond 30-second clips. His globally distributed team works with clients from college athletics to nonprofits, and a $1 million investment would expand the platform he believes will reshape digital storytelling.
Chapters
I think that social media itself is ready for disruption, and social media 2.0 is coming because currently entire generations of people just consume media in 30-second clips. I'm an immigrant food stamp kid from Jersey. Parents worked really hard to, to kind of get us through schools and those types of things, and ended up going to Drexel University. in Philadelphia, did engineering, and moved out to Silicon Valley way back in '96.
In Silicon Valley's shape-shifting studios, Deepak Patel sees what traditional media cannot: the immersive stories behind every virtual experience. His team at Zeality weaves reality with digital understanding.
Entrepreneurialism is kind of been built into my family, you know, for, for a long time, just with my, my parents and, and family before that. You know, I'm a single parent here in Silicon Valley. 2 kids inspire me every day, and they check me every day, which is always cool. And yeah, I mean, I see them, I say, all right, well, what are we building? What are we building? Why are we building it? And how can we support their existence and their friends' existence and their family's existence way into the future? I'm a big fan of, like, figuring out how to connect our legacies.
Beyond screens, Zeality creates VR experiences that illuminate pathways for businesses to thrive with purpose.
My name is Deepak Patel. Founder of Zeality. We're looking to bring the Z-axis to the masses. I feel that social media disrupted traditional media around 3 pillars: connections, 140-character headlines, and videos. And videos, actually, not until the founder went to the zoo, filmed an elephant, did they realize that they can go from tape to digital. To streaming. I think that social media itself is ready for disruption, and social media 2.0 is coming because currently entire generations of people just consume media in 30-second clips. And from my point of view, when you add that z-axis, you can create a completely new way for storytellers to interact and engage with their audience. I believe storytellers shape humanity, right? And for me, there's almost this war between storytelling and big media companies. To some degree, there's a war with censorship and propaganda. And so I, I want to use our team to help tip the scale on the side of storytellers, create new ways for them to engage and monetize with a completely new media format that we created. You know, I've got a great software development team around the world, Croatia. I've got people in India working on our intellectual property and patents. I've got people in the Bay Area. So we're all over the place all the time. Our customers are across, across the globe as well, whether it's places like what's happening in the Middle East or Ukraine Or sports properties here in the, in, in the US. So what would the opportunity to work with Tim mean for your company right now in the stage that it's in? So the opportunity to work with Tim would be a phenomenal partnership because like what we believe, he believes in game-changing technology that can have significant impact Through immersive technology and bold leadership, Deepak proves that the future isn't about replacing reality.
It's about amplifying human connection through virtual experiences.
What would a million-dollar investment mean to your company right now? So a million-dollar investment for Xiality would allow us to accelerate what we want to do with existing customers. Or existing partners, not only on the college athletics side, but also what we are doing with organizations like Elnet. And Elnet is a nonprofit that is building relationships between Israel and European countries to start surfacing stories about what's going on over there, to start to really bring down the tensions and start to move towards peace. My kids would be excited. My son specifically, he's been along this journey with me. He's one of my beta testers. In fact, he's one of my grips when I go shoot content. He's right there with the camera, holding onto the backpack, and capturing content with me. My internal New Jersey food stamp kid, that kid would tell me that I'm not going hard enough.
Right?
He would say to me, you can do better. You can go harder. You can go faster. You can go bigger.
