Darshan Shankar

Darshan Shankar is a technology entrepreneur who founded Bigscreen, the company behind the social virtual reality application Bigscreen and the Bigscreen Beyond line of lightweight PC VR headsets. He founded Bigscreen in 2014 and, as of October 2026, the company's own site names him as its chief executive officer. Before Bigscreen he co-founded Flotype, a Y Combinator start-up that made real-time messaging software for web developers.

Shankar wrote Bigscreen's first code himself and worked as a one-person team from 2014 to 2016. The app grew into a virtual cinema and desktop-sharing platform for PC VR and Meta Quest headsets, and in 2023 the company moved into hardware with the Bigscreen Beyond, a headset that Shankar said was built because "VR was too heavy, bulky, and uncomfortable".

Reviewed 15 October 2026. Checked every date, figure, funding amount, investor list and Shankar quote against the cited Bigscreen, Y Combinator, Steam, Road to VR, UploadVR, TechCrunch, The Next Web, Global Venturing and Mogura VR sources. About review dates.

Flotype

Shankar was founder and CEO of Flotype, a company founded in 2010 that took part in Y Combinator's Winter 2011 batch. Y Combinator lists Eric Zhang and Sridatta Thatipamala as its other founders, and describes the company as inactive. When Flotype released the NowJS framework in March 2011, The Next Web described the three founders as "a group of Berkeley drop-outs".

NowJS was a framework built on Node.js and Socket.io that allowed real-time communication between server-side and client-side code, so that the two behaved like a single program. The Next Web highlighted that it could be used to write a chat room in 12 lines of code. Y Combinator's profile describes NowJS as free and open source. Shankar told The Next Web at the time, "I believe that Web 3.0 will be real-time, and we will lead the charge," and said the company's speculated business model was a platform-as-a-service: hosting for real-time applications. Y Combinator's company profile lists three Flotype products: Bridge, enterprise middleware for real-time messaging that the company licensed to customers; NowJS; and NowCluster, a paid offering that added scalability and reliability for NowJS applications.

In January 2012 Global Venturing reported that Flotype had raised US$1.4 million in a seed round with participation from Salesforce, Andreessen Horowitz, Ignition Partners, InterWest Partners, SV Angel, Start Fund, Y Combinator and individual angel investors including Yuri Milner and Paul Buchheit.

Bigscreen

Founding and the Bigscreen app

Shankar founded Bigscreen in 2014. In a 2023 interview with Mogura VR, he said the goal since the company's founding had been to make something people could use for 10 hours a day, every day, and that he had worked on VR full time since 2014. When Bigscreen came out of stealth in March 2016, Road to VR described Shankar as a Y Combinator alumnus who had been working on the project since 2014 and had released it as a private beta in July 2015. The same report said that Hayden Lee, a co-founder of the earlier social VR app Convrge, was joining the team as a co-founder. The app let up to four people share a virtual room and see each other's computer desktops, for activities such as watching video together or holding a virtual LAN party.

Funding

In February 2017 Bigscreen announced a US$3 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with True Ventures, Presence Capital, Ludlow Ventures, David Bettner and SV Angel also taking part. Shankar said the investor pitches had been held in virtual reality, "using Bigscreen to close the round". In the company's announcement, he described a "disciplined and lean approach" built around a small core team. He told UploadVR that the round had been oversubscribed, with more than US$17 million in offers, and that he had chosen to raise less in order to focus first on product-market fit.

In October 2017 the company raised an US$11 million Series A led by True Ventures, with Andreessen Horowitz participating. Speaking to TechCrunch, Shankar said "the original inspiration for Bigscreen was to build virtual office systems", and that seed and Series A funding for VR had "effectively dried up completely" over the past year. He said the company wanted to be sure it had money for the next several years rather than raise only once it had run out. Bigscreen says the two rounds raised US$14 million in under a year.

In November 2020 Bigscreen announced a virtual question-and-answer session between Shankar and author Ernest Cline, streamed inside the app on 5 December 2020 as part of Cline's virtual book tour for Ready Player Two. In the announcement Shankar said that in 2011, before VR headsets were widely available, Ready Player One had inspired the team about "what was possible with VR".

Bigscreen Beyond headsets

Shankar told Mogura VR that, after improving the software, the company concluded that hardware was the main factor limiting how long people used VR, and that from around 2017 he had been asking when headsets would become smaller and more comfortable. He also said some newer headsets weighed more than the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive of 2016, and that Bigscreen intended to be the "other company" that Mark Zuckerberg had said might build a lighter headset while Meta aimed for mixed reality.

Bigscreen announced the Bigscreen Beyond on 13 February 2023 with US pre-orders at US$999. It weighed 127 grams and used two OLED microdisplays at 2560 x 2560 pixels per eye, with tracking by external SteamVR base stations. In the company's announcement, Shankar said: "As passionate VR enthusiasts, we built the VR headset we wanted for ourselves." During press demonstrations he told Road to VR that the custom-fit facepad was an essential part of making such a small headset. Bigscreen began shipping the headset to US customers in September 2023 and said it handled critical parts of manufacturing in-house, including the custom-fit elements and quality control, and was hiring staff for its Los Angeles factory. In the April 2023 interview, Shankar said Bigscreen had no more than 50 employees.

The company announced the Bigscreen Beyond 2 and the eye-tracking Bigscreen Beyond 2e on 20 March 2025, quoting a weight of 107 grams and a 116 degree diagonal field of view. UploadVR described Bigscreen at that point as a company of fewer than 40 employees. Shankar wrote to the outlet that delivering "an incredible theater in your home for <$2k" had "long been the focus" of the company.

Statements in 2026

In a January 2026 email interview with UploadVR, Shankar said the Beyond 2 had sold about three times as many units as the first Beyond, and that December was the company's biggest month of shipping. He said Bigscreen was "firmly committed" to manufacturing the Beyond 2 with SteamVR Lighthouse tracking for the following two years, and that the Beyond 2e's eye-tracking cameras were the first computer vision product the company had shipped. He also said more than half of sales came from outside the United States, that the company planned to open a facility in the Netherlands in early 2026 to speed up European deliveries, and that it expected annual revenue to pass US$100 million within the next year. Bigscreen's about page states that its software has more than 6 million users and that it has shipped more than 50,000 hardware orders to customers in more than 50 countries since 2023.

Career timeline

Year	Event
2010	Co-founds Flotype; the company joins Y Combinator's Winter 2011 batch
2011	Flotype releases the open-source NowJS framework
2012	Flotype's US$1.4 million seed round is reported
2014	Founds Bigscreen
2015	Bigscreen private beta released (July)
2017	Bigscreen raises a US$3 million seed round (February) and an US$11 million Series A (October)
2023	Bigscreen Beyond announced (February) and shipped to US customers (September)
2025	Bigscreen Beyond 2 and Beyond 2e announced (March)

See also

• Bigscreen
• Bigscreen Beyond
• Bigscreen Beyond 2
• Bigscreen Beyond 2e
• Social VR