Startup Deep Dive : Avishkaar — profitable, in 6,000 schools, and still no deal on Shark Tank

Avishkaar has put robotics kits in more than 6,000 schools across 30-plus countries, trained upward of 300,000 children by its own count, and turned a ₹44 lakh loss in FY23 into a ₹2.31 crore profit by FY25. Yet when its founders asked for ₹80 lakh at a ₹80 crore (~$8.3 million) valuation on Shark Tank India in January 2026, every one of the sharks passed.

That contradiction is the story here. A company can show sixteen years of school relationships, patents in five countries and a profit line trending the right way, and still fail to convince professional investors that the business is legible enough to bet on. What Avishkaar sells, how it survived a decade of hardware headaches, and why its own numbers made television investors uneasy is what this piece unpacks.

Quick facts

What they do

Avishkaar makes do-it-yourself robotics, artificial intelligence and coding kits for children roughly aged five to fifteen, and sells them two ways: directly to parents as take-home boxes, and to schools as lab infrastructure with a curriculum attached. Its product range spans entry-level STEAM boxes for younger children through to robotics series kits such as its Mars Rover and Butler robot builds, an AI module line, and Tweak, a screen-free, patent-protected coding system built around fourteen learning phases. On the institutional side, Avishkaar sets up and runs innovation labs inside schools, including under the government’s Atal Tinkering Labs programme, pairing hardware with structured activities and teacher training rather than leaving kits to gather dust in a cupboard.

The origin

Tarun Bhalla studied computer science at Delhi University, then took an MBA at the University of Washington in Seattle, and worked at Wipro Technologies, Aplion Networks, RealNetworks and Expedia before turning to education. The idea traces back to his own daughter: watching her disengage from lessons that asked her to listen and remember rather than build and test, and hearing similar frustration from other parents during his interactions with schools, convinced him that hands-on tinkering taught concepts that a classroom lecture alone could not. That conviction first took shape as Building Blocks Learning Solutions, the entity under which Avishkaar Box was built, before the Avishkaar brand and its wider kit and lab business grew out of it. Rajeev Gaba, who holds an MS from BITS Pilani and had led engineering teams at Belkin, came on as co-founder and CTO to build the hardware and technology side, while Yogita Bhalla, who studied at Virginia Tech, took on curriculum and learning design as co-founder.

The struggle years

Bhalla has been candid that building a hardware company in India tests a founder at every stage. In his own words, the company faced difficulty “in every sphere of running a typical hardware product company in India — right from product development, sourcing, vendor and team building.” Reliable component sourcing was the hardest of these: early batches of kits ran into vendor quality problems that could not be fixed by better marketing or a better curriculum, only by rebuilding the supply chain itself. The fix took years, not weeks — Avishkaar had to design a stricter vendor benchmarking process and add a three-step in-house testing pass before any kit reached a customer, an operational rebuild that ran alongside the ordinary difficulty of getting a school administration to say yes to a new, unfamiliar subject.

That slow, expensive fix is visible in the financials, too. As late as FY23 — thirteen years after founding — Avishkaar was still posting a loss of ₹44 lakh on revenue of ₹7.63 crore, evidence that scale in schools does not automatically translate into a clean profit and loss statement for a hardware-and-curriculum business.

The turning point

The clearest inflection point in Avishkaar’s own telling is commercial, not financial: after years of skepticism from parents and schools about whether a “robotics kit” was worth paying for, the company sold 500 units of its early Robotronics series kit within four months of launch. For a hardware-education product with no existing category in India to point to, that volume, reached quickly and without an established market to sell into, was the signal that let the company commit further capital and time to building out the kit range and, later, the school-lab business, rather than treating the idea as a side project.

The money behind it

Avishkaar’s funding history is short and mostly angel-led rather than venture-backed, in keeping with a hardware-education business that took years to reach profitability.

• February 2018: ₹5 crore ($772,500) seed round from Auxano Deals, Avishkaar’s first institutional-style backer (Entrepreneur India, BW Education, February 2018).
• June 2021: ₹5 crore pre-Series A round, co-led by Mumbai Angels Network and returning investor Auxano, with participation from angel investors Alok Mittal (co-founder and CEO, Indifi Technologies, and co-founder of Snapdeal) and Varun Aggarwal (co-founder, Aspiring Minds) (Business Standard, YourStory, Entrepreneur India, June 2021).
• Total raised: reported as $1.46 million by Inc42 and $1.78 million by Crunchbase — the two trackers disagree by roughly $320,000, so both figures are given here rather than one asserted as final.
• Latest valuation: ₹80 crore (~$8.3 million), the figure the founders themselves put forward while seeking ₹80 lakh for 1% equity on Shark Tank India Season 5 in January 2026 — a founder ask, not a completed funding round, since no shark took the deal.

What each backer changed: Auxano’s 2018 cheque was the first outside validation that let Avishkaar move past bootstrapped, founder-funded growth; Mumbai Angels’ 2021 round, coming through the COVID-era squeeze on physical-kit sales and school access, was earmarked by the company for product development, portfolio expansion and a push into tier-I and tier-II Indian cities alongside international institutional demand.

How it makes money

Avishkaar earns through a mix of direct-to-consumer hardware sales and business-to-institution contracts, rather than a single subscription line.

• Take-home kits: STEAM and INVENTORS-series boxes sold directly to parents, priced as one-time hardware purchases with bundled activity content.
• School and government lab contracts: setting up and running innovation labs inside schools, including under the Atal Tinkering Labs scheme, which bundles hardware, curriculum and teacher training into a multi-year institutional relationship rather than a single sale.
• Courses and microdegrees: self-learn and instructor-led coding, robotics and AI courses sold on top of the hardware base.
• Competitions and community programmes: the Avishkaar League and related events, which the company has said draw more than 10,000 participating children and function as a demand-generation and brand layer over the kit business.

The part people tend to get wrong is treating this as a pure hardware margin business, like a toy company. The kits themselves face the same cost pressures as any India-manufactured hardware product — components, vendor quality and logistics all eat into gross margin, which is why the founders have spoken about sourcing as one of the company’s hardest and most persistent problems. The more durable margin, on the company’s own account, sits in the institutional lab and curriculum contracts, where a school pays for an ongoing relationship rather than a one-off box, and in course and microdegree sales that carry closer to a services cost structure once the initial content is built.

The numbers

Figures below are as disclosed by the founders on Shark Tank India Season 5 (aired January 2026) and reported by Indian Startup News; they are company-stated rather than drawn from a public exchange filing, since Avishkaar is unlisted and does not publish audited results.

• FY23 to FY24: revenue up 35.8% year-on-year, and the company moved from loss to profit.
• FY24 to FY25: revenue up 29.0% year-on-year, with profit growing more than fourfold, from ₹57 lakh to ₹2.31 crore.
• FY26 target: founders projected ₹26-27 crore in revenue for the year, telling the sharks that roughly ₹15 crore had already been booked at the time of taping (Indian Startup News, reporting on the January 2026 broadcast) — a company projection, not a closed-year result, and it is included here as such.

Where the money comes from

Avishkaar has not published an audited revenue split by channel or geography. What is verifiable, from the company’s own reporting and its Shark Tank India pitch, is the shape of its reach rather than a rupee-for-rupee breakdown.

• Institutional reach: presence in 6,000-plus schools, per the company’s own about page.
• International footprint: operations or sales touchpoints in 30-plus countries, cited both on the company site and in the Shark Tank India pitch.
• Users trained: the company states 300,000-plus children on its own site, while the founders told Shark Tank India’s judges the figure was over 10 lakh (one million) counting students reached through innovation labs and institutional partnerships — a wide gap between the two self-reported numbers that this piece flags rather than resolves, since neither is independently audited.
• The surprise: for a company whose consumer-facing brand is a take-home robotics box, a meaningful share of its credibility and reach comes from government-adjacent infrastructure — Atal Tinkering Labs contracts under the Atal Innovation Mission — rather than from open-market toy retail alone.

The risks

• Hardware sourcing and quality control: Bhalla has said the company has struggled at “every sphere” of running a hardware product business in India, from component sourcing to vendor management — a structural cost and quality risk that does not go away with scale, since every new kit generation reopens the same sourcing problem.
• Investor legibility, despite scale claims: on national television in January 2026, professional investors who had access to the same reach and revenue numbers in this piece still declined to invest, with judge Anupam Mittal citing “too many moving parts” in the business and other sharks pointing to unclear market positioning and inconsistent branding across the kit, lab and course lines (Indian Startup News, January 2026). That is a live risk signal from people who underwrote the specific numbers, not outside commentary.
• Dependence on institutional and government-linked demand: a meaningful part of Avishkaar’s credibility and reach runs through school and Atal Tinkering Lab contracts tied to government procurement and budget cycles, which move on policy and tender timelines rather than ordinary consumer demand.

The takeaway

Avishkaar’s clearest lesson is that survival and fundability are not the same test. A hardware-and-curriculum business can spend a decade fixing its supply chain, turn a real loss into a real profit, and build genuine relationships with thousands of schools, and still strike professional investors as too sprawling to underwrite in a fifteen-minute pitch. The founders solved for staying alive first — sourcing, vendor quality, school trust — and only later for the kind of single, legible growth story that a term sheet requires. For any founder building something that has to be manufactured, shipped and installed rather than simply downloaded, that ordering is often unavoidable, and it is worth planning for the gap between the two rather than assuming one follows automatically from the other.

Frequently asked questions

Who founded Avishkaar and when?

Avishkaar was founded in 2010 in New Delhi by Tarun Bhalla, Yogita Bhalla and Rajeev Gaba, growing out of an earlier venture, Building Blocks Learning Solutions.

What does Avishkaar actually sell?

Take-home robotics, AI and coding kits for children aged roughly five to fifteen, plus school-based innovation labs (including under the government’s Atal Tinkering Labs scheme) and online coding and robotics courses.

Did Avishkaar get a deal on Shark Tank India?

No. The founders sought ₹80 lakh for 1% equity, valuing the company at ₹80 crore, on Shark Tank India Season 5 in January 2026, but no shark invested, with judges citing concerns about market clarity and brand focus.

Is Avishkaar profitable?

By its own account, yes as of FY25: it moved from a ₹44 lakh loss in FY23 to a ₹57 lakh profit in FY24 and a ₹2.31 crore profit in FY25, on revenue of ₹13.36 crore, according to figures the founders disclosed on Shark Tank India.

How much funding has Avishkaar raised?

Two disclosed rounds: a ₹5 crore seed round from Auxano in February 2018, and a ₹5 crore pre-Series A round co-led by Mumbai Angels Network and Auxano in June 2021. Total funding is reported as $1.46 million by Inc42 and $1.78 million by Crunchbase.

Sources

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

• Indian Startup News, “Why STEM education startup Avishkaar failed to secure a deal on Shark Tank India despite strong B2B traction”, January 2026
• Wikipedia, “Shark Tank India season 5” (episode listing and broadcast dates), accessed September 2026
• Business Standard, “Edtech startup Avishkaar raises Rs 5 crore of funding in pre-series A”, June 2021
• YourStory, “Edtech startup Avishkaar raises pre-series A funding from Mumbai Angels”, June 2021
• Entrepreneur India, “Edtech Startup Avishkaar Raises INR 5 Cr In Pre-Series A Round Co-led By Mumbai Angels And Auxano”, June 2021
• BW Education, “Funding Of 5 Cr For Edtech Startup Avishkaar”, February 2018
• Entrepreneur India (Entrepreneur India Blog), “Auxano Deals Invests In Ed-tech Startup Avishkaar Box”, February 2018
• Inc42, Avishkaar company funding profile, accessed September 2026
• Crunchbase, Avishkaar organization profile, accessed September 2026
• Avishkaar official website, “About Us” page (home.avishkaar.cc/about), accessed September 2026
• CrazyEngineers, “Interview with Tarun Bhalla, Co-Founder – Avishkaar Box”, accessed September 2026
• Elets Insights, “Tarun Bhalla, Founder & CEO, Avishkaar”, August 2019
• Avishkaar Community Blog, “Atal Tinkering Labs Powered by Mentors of Change”, accessed September 2026

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