Startup Deep Dive : Practically — a Rs 210 crore valuation, then 190 job cuts

In April 2022, backers of the Hyderabad edtech startup Practically put a reported valuation of ₹210 crore (about $21.9 million, at the rate below) on its parent company, 3rdFlix Visual Effects. Four months later, the same company was quietly cutting roughly 190 jobs because a signed $5 million term sheet never turned into wired money.

That gap between a paper valuation built in the boom and a headcount built on money that stopped arriving is the story of Practically. It sold augmented-reality science and math lessons to Indian schoolchildren through the pandemic, then spent the two years after trying to survive the return to ordinary classrooms.

Quick facts

What they do

Practically is a mobile and web learning app for students in classes 6 to 12, built by 3rdFlix Visual Effects. It replaces textbook diagrams with 3D animated videos, augmented-reality simulations viewed through a phone camera, and an AI study companion called Proton, covering the science and maths syllabus taught in Indian schools. The company sells this two ways: directly to families as a paid subscription app, and through schools, which get a free teacher-facing tool called Practically School Solution that is used to route students toward the same paid consumer product. In April 2022 the company added a second, largely unrelated line of business when it acquired Fedena, a school-management ERP used for attendance, fees and timetables, turning 3rdFlix into a supplier of both classroom content and back-office software for institutions.

The origin

The company’s three founders, Subbarao Siddabattula, Ilangovel Thulasimani and Charu Noheria, met not in a classroom but at Lumeris, a US healthcare-analytics firm. Siddabattula had spent two decades in enterprise technology and operations and served as Lumeris’s CTO; Thulasimani had built enterprise architecture there after earlier stints at eBay and Quikr; Noheria, an engineer with an MBA from the University of Illinois, had started her career at Samsung. None of them came from a classroom background. What they shared was a conviction, carried over from the healthcare-data world, that people learn by doing rather than by reading, echoing Edgar Dale’s cone of learning, which holds that learners retain roughly 10% of what they read against roughly 90% of what they do by practising it themselves. They tested that conviction before they sold it: a pilot study run ahead of launch found a group taught with immersive AR content retained noticeably more than a group taught the conventional way, and that pilot became the basis of their pitch to schools and, later, to investors.

The struggle years

Practically’s timeline carries two hard breaks. The first came almost immediately after launch. The company piloted its augmented-reality classroom tool inside physical schools across Andhra Pradesh and Telangana starting January 2020, only for national lockdowns to shut every one of those classrooms within about ten weeks. Rather than wait out the closures, the founders rebuilt the product as a virtual-classroom tool with automated attendance and an AI system that flagged when a student on camera stopped paying attention, and pushed it out to teachers directly from April 2020. It worked as a growth story, with 10,000 teachers registering within four weeks of the pivot, but it meant the company was running two structurally different products inside its first year of commercial life.

The second break was financial rather than technical. In May 2022, with the broader edtech funding market already cooling, Practically signed a term sheet for $5 million in fresh capital. The money never arrived. Cofounder and COO Charu Noheria later said that “the macroeconomic conditions prevented the investors from wiring any money, which resulted in a cash crunch at the startup.” The company had been counting on bridge funding arriving by mid-November 2022; instead it spent the second half of the year cutting headcount, shedding roughly 190 employees between mid-August and the end of 2022, which by Inc42’s count made it the 45th Indian startup, and 15th edtech company, to downsize that year.

The turning point

The clearest inflection point is the Fedena acquisition, announced in April 2022, weeks before the layoffs began. Fedena was a school-management ERP built by Foradian Technologies and used, by its own account, across roughly 40,000 institutions serving some 20 million users. Before the deal, 3rdFlix was a single-product consumer edtech company selling subscriptions to families and treating schools mainly as a distribution channel. After it, the company also held a contracted, institution-facing revenue line that did not depend on a parent’s month-to-month decision to keep paying for an AR subscription. The timing turned out to matter more than anyone announcing the deal could have known: within four months, the consumer side of the business was cutting jobs over a funding round that fell through, while the acquired enterprise side gave 3rdFlix a business that outlasted the AR app itself. By the time of writing, the original Practically consumer app’s own Play Store listing had disappeared, while the parent company was still reporting revenue growth of 256% for FY24.

The money behind it

Practically raised money across several rounds between 2019 and 2021, all of it before the 2022 crash:

• September 2019: Pre-Series A, $5 million, led by Exfinity Venture Partners, with YourNest Venture Capital, IDFC Parampara and high-net-worth individuals participating.
• January 2021: Pre-Series B, $4 million, led by Siana Capital with YourNest Venture Capital.
• December 2021: Strategic round ahead of a planned Series B, $5 million, from NB Ventures (UAE), Earlsfield Capital (UK), Almoe Group of Companies (UAE) and Ncubate Capital.
• Total raised: about $14 million by the end of 2021, per the company’s own disclosures at the time.
• Latest reported valuation: ₹210 crore as of 19 April 2022, per data provider Tracxn; this piece could not independently confirm the figure with a second source.

Three backers stand out for what they changed rather than just how much they wrote. Exfinity Venture Partners’ 2019 cheque was the company’s first institutional capital and funded the shift from a physical-classroom pilot to a nationwide app. Siana Capital’s January 2021 round arrived in the middle of the pandemic-era surge in edtech demand and funded expansion beyond Telangana and Andhra Pradesh into what cofounder Charu Noheria called the “South and West regions” of India. The December 2021 Gulf-investor round, led by NB Ventures with Earlsfield Capital and Almoe, was explicitly a bridge to a Series B that, on the evidence of the layoffs eight months later, never closed.

How it makes money

Practically runs on two different revenue mechanics stitched into one company.

• Consumer subscriptions: the Practically app was freemium, with paid plans reported at around ₹299 a month domestically (about $19.99 for international users) and smaller add-on packs starting at ₹99 a month. Schools got the teacher-facing tool free; the company’s own sales agents then worked to convert students inside those schools to the paid consumer app.
• Enterprise software: from April 2022, the acquired Fedena business added a contracted-license line selling school-administration software directly to institutions rather than to individual parents.

The part people tend to get wrong is treating this as one edtech content business with one margin structure. It is closer to a content-subscription app bolted onto a school-software company. The subscription side depends on discretionary household spending and is exposed to every swing in parents’ willingness to pay for extracurricular learning once the pandemic’s forced-digital moment passed. The enterprise side depends on annual institutional contracts that are stickier to keep but slower to sell and expand. The AR-content side also needed constant new video and simulation production to keep subscribers renewing, a cost base that does not shrink just because subscriber growth stalls, which is as much the mechanism behind the 2022 cash crunch as the missed funding round itself.

The numbers

3rdFlix Visual Effects is a private limited company and does not publish full audited results publicly. The figures below come from Registrar of Companies filings as summarised by financial-data platforms; net profit or loss for these years has not been made public and is not estimated here.

Sources: Tofler company financials for the FY23 growth rate, and TheCompanyCheck’s RoC filing summary for the FY24 revenue figure and growth rate, both retrieved September 2026.

• Headcount fell from 300-plus employees in December 2021 to about 50 at the legal entity by February 2024, a contraction of more than 80% (TheCompanyCheck).
• Headcount had recovered to around 104 by August 2026, per Tracxn, tracking the surviving Fedena/enterprise business rather than the discontinued consumer app.
• Paid-up capital remains ₹16.64 lakh against ₹23.2 lakh authorised (RoC filing via TheCompanyCheck), a thin base relative to the roughly $14 million raised historically, most of which sits outside paid-up capital in ways this piece could not further verify from public filings.

Where the money comes from

• Core geography: Telangana and Andhra Pradesh were the original markets at the January 2021 raise; the company said it would use that round to expand into the “South and West regions” of India.
• School channel: by December 2021 the company counted more than 200 schools and 18,000 teachers on its free Practically School Solution, the funnel it used to reach paying consumer subscribers.
• International ambition versus disclosed revenue: three of the December 2021 strategic-round investors, NB Ventures, Earlsfield Capital and Almoe, are UAE- and UK-based, and the company had flagged the US, Africa, the UAE and Southeast Asia as expansion targets as early as 2019, but no public revenue split by geography exists.
• Post-2022 mix: after the Fedena acquisition, the enterprise ERP line, sold to institutions rather than families, became the part of the business still generating disclosed revenue growth; the consumer AR app’s own store listing was gone by the time of writing.

The surprise is which half of the business survived. Practically was built and funded as a consumer content brand; that is the product every funding announcement talked about. Yet it is the acquired, far less publicised school-ERP business that appears to account for the company’s continued filings and revenue growth through FY24, while the flagship AR app that gave the company its name quietly disappeared from app stores.

The risks

• Discretionary-spend dependence: the consumer app’s roughly ₹299-a-month pricing competes for the same household budget as every other subscription, and Indian edtech funding overall fell from $4.73 billion in 2021 to $283 million in 2023, meaning renewal and new-sign-up behaviour outside a pandemic has no reliable comparison for the company to lean on.
• Capital-market timing: the 2022 crisis shows the company’s cost base of content production and school-facing sales agents did not flex down as fast as a term sheet could fall through; a signed $5 million round collapsed within months and forced roughly 190 job cuts.
• Thin public capitalisation: paid-up capital of ₹16.64 lakh against roughly $14 million raised historically means most external capital sits outside the entity’s core disclosed equity in ways that limit what outside observers, including this one, can confirm about the group’s balance sheet from public filings alone.

The takeaway

The lesson in Practically’s numbers is not that augmented-reality content in classrooms failed; plenty of schools kept using immersive material, and the company’s own school network kept growing even as its funding did not. It is that a consumer subscription edtech business and a B2B enterprise-software business run on different clocks. One needs constant content and marketing spend to keep monthly subscribers renewing. The other needs a slower, contract-by-contract sales motion that pays back over years rather than months. Practically tried to fund the first with money raised on the promise of the second’s scale, and when a single term sheet fell through in 2022, the mismatch showed up immediately as job cuts rather than as a gradual slowdown. The part of the company still filing accounts and growing revenue in 2026 is not, in the end, the one its early funding rounds were sold on.

Frequently asked questions

What does Practically do?

Practically is a K-12 learning app, built by 3rdFlix Visual Effects, that teaches science and maths syllabus topics through 3D animated videos and augmented-reality simulations, sold as a consumer subscription and distributed partly through a free teacher tool used in schools.

Who founded 3rdFlix Visual Effects?

Subbarao Siddabattula, Ilangovel Thulasimani and Charu Noheria, three former colleagues at the US healthcare-analytics firm Lumeris, started working on the idea in 2014 and formally incorporated the company on 5 March 2018.

How much money has Practically raised?

About $14 million across rounds from 2019 to 2021, led at different stages by Exfinity Venture Partners, Siana Capital, and a Gulf-investor group including NB Ventures, Earlsfield Capital and Almoe Group of Companies.

Is the Practically app still available?

No. As of September 2026 its Google Play listing no longer resolves. Third-party app tracker AppBrain dates the removal to 5 October 2024, after roughly 1.6 million cumulative installs and a last product update in June 2023.

What happened to Practically in 2022?

A signed $5 million term sheet from May 2022 fell through, which cofounder Charu Noheria attributed to macroeconomic conditions preventing investors from wiring committed capital. The company cut roughly 190 jobs in the months that followed.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• Inc42, “3rdFlix Looks To Solve Edtech’s Attention Deficit Issues With Immersive Virtual Classrooms”, July 2020
• Inc42, “STEM Edtech App Practically Raises $4 Mn In Pre-Series B Led By Siana Capital”, January 2021
• Inc42, “Edtech Startup Practically Lays Off Employees Citing Cash Crunch”, August 2022
• Inc42, edtech layoffs and funding-decline coverage citing $4.73 billion (2021) to $283 million (2023) sector funding fall, 2023
• YourStory, “[Funding alert] Hyderabad startup Practically raises $4M in Pre-Series B round led by Siana Capital”, January 2021
• YourStory, “[Funding alert] Edtech startup Practically raises $5M from NB Ventures, Earlsfield Capital, others”, December 2021
• Franchise India, “With latest $5 mn funding, Edtech startup 3rdFlix Visual Effects eyes to increase its current market penetration”, September 2019
• StartupTalky, “Practically Startup Story – App that Brings Learning Alive!”, accessed September 2026
• Bar & Bench, “Samisti Legal acts on Ed-Tech firm Practically acquisition of Fedena”, April 2022
• BPAS / FinancialContent, “Practically acquires Fedena School ERP, becomes world’s first company with a comprehensive EdTech product suite”, April 2022
• Tracxn, company profiles for “3rdFlix” and “Practically”, accessed September 2026
• TheCompanyCheck, “3Rdflix Visual Effects Private Limited – FY 2025 Insights”, accessed September 2026
• Tofler, “3Rdflix Visual Effects Private Limited” company financials, accessed September 2026
• AppBrain, “Practically – Learning app” listing data, accessed September 2026
• Google Play Store listing check for com.thirdflix.practically, September 2026 (listing not found)
• Trading Economics, USD/INR exchange rate, 18 September 2026

Found an error? Write to us and we’ll correct it in the open, dated, on the piece.