Sunrise International Education
Sunrise International is a cross-border marketing and immersive media company with a specialization in the Chinese market and focus on higher education, VR/AR, and e-commerce industries. The company also operates an experimental education and extracurricular learning division based in China. It was founded in 2011 by Gavin Newton-Tanzer and David Weeks and was a member of the Columbia Startup Lab in 2014.Sunrise International is the local organizer of the Augmented World Expo (AWE) Asia, an annual virtual and augmented reality industry event typically hosted in China.As a media and marketing company, Sunrise International advocates for international brands to directly advertise on local Chinese media channels, citing issues surrounding the Great Firewall of China as a reason for why local users cannot access international social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Youtube. The organization is occasionally quoted by international news outlets on various issues relating to VR/AR in China, cross-border e-commerce in China, education technology, and issues surrounding international student mobility. Early on in the COVID-19 pandemic, the company spoke on a number of occasions about the impact of the pandemic on international student mobility.