In a Delhi trial, children who used Educational Initiatives’ Mindspark software for four and a half months scored 0.37 standard deviations higher in mathematics and 0.23 higher in Hindi than a comparison group — gains researchers judged to be roughly twice the normal progress, at a cost of about ₹1,000 per student a month. The independent economists who ran that experiment did not work for the company; they published the numbers in a working paper that edtech founders still quote.
Yet the company behind that result spent more than two decades as one of Indian edtech’s quietest names. It booked about ₹150 crore in revenue in the year to March 2025 while louder rivals raised billions of dollars and then imploded. Educational Initiatives never built a consumer app you would recognise from a cricket-match advertisement. It sold tests. This is the story of how an assessments company from Ahmedabad turned “measuring what children actually understand” into a durable business — and why that unglamorous choice outlasted the boom.
Quick facts
| Company | Educational Initiatives Private Limited (Ei); CIN U80211GJ2000PTC038692 |
| Founded | Incorporated 22 September 2000 in Gujarat; operations from 2001 |
| Founders | Sridhar Rajagopalan, Srini Raghavan, Sudhir Ghodke and Venkat Krishnan (IIM-Ahmedabad alumni) |
| Businesses | Ei ASSET (diagnostic assessments), Ei Mindspark (adaptive learning), Ei Diagnostics, Ei CARES |
| Latest FY revenue | About ₹150 crore in FY25 (company-stated, reported by The Economic Times) |
| Latest FY profit | ₹10.8 crore profit after tax in FY24 (Inc42); FY25 profit not disclosed |
| Listed | Private (unlisted) |
| Last major deal | HCL Group bought a minority stake for ₹166 crore (about $20 million) in March 2024, a secondary purchase from Gaja Capital |
| Key shareholders / leadership | Gaja Capital and HCL Group (investors); Pranav Kothari (Managing Director and CEO); Sridhar Rajagopalan (co-founder) |
What Educational Initiatives does
Educational Initiatives, branded Ei, sells assessment and adaptive-learning products to schools rather than directly to parents. It is a business-to-business company: its customers are private schools, school chains, and government education departments in India and abroad. Its two anchor products do different jobs.
- Ei ASSET — a diagnostic test (Assessment of Scholastic Skills through Educational Testing) that measures whether a child has understood a concept, not whether they can reproduce it. Ei has said ASSET is taken by more than 380,000 students a year across India and international markets.
- Ei Mindspark — an adaptive online tutor for mathematics, English and Hindi that adjusts question difficulty to each child’s level and gives instant feedback. It runs on computers, tablets and phones, online or offline.
- Ei Diagnostics and Ei CARES — supporting assessment and school-improvement products that extend the same “diagnose, then teach” logic.
As of the September 2025 announcement of its Open Door acquisition, the company said it worked with around 1,000 schools in India plus international markets including the UAE, South Africa, Qatar and Kuwait.
The origin: a school that revealed a measurement problem
The founding insight did not come from a spreadsheet. In 1997 a group that included Sridhar Rajagopalan, Venkat Krishnan and Sudhir Ghodke helped run the Eklavya School in Ahmedabad, alongside entrepreneur-educator Sunil Handa. Watching bright students up close, they noticed something uncomfortable: children who scored well in exams often could not explain the ideas underneath the marks. High scores were hiding shallow understanding. Rote learning was not a fringe problem; it was the system working as designed.
Four IIM-Ahmedabad alumni — Rajagopalan, Srini Raghavan, Ghodke and Krishnan — turned that observation into a company in 2001, building it on research into how children actually learn and, crucially, where they go wrong. The distinctive move was to treat student misconceptions as data. Instead of asking “did the child get the right answer”, Ei’s tests were designed to reveal the specific wrong idea a child holds, so a teacher can address it. That is the thread connecting everything the company has built since: assessment first, teaching second.
The struggle years
Assessment is a hard business to grow. Schools buy slowly, budgets are thin, and a diagnostic test does not sell itself the way a flashy app does. Ei’s revenue reflected that patience. As late as FY21 the company was still a roughly ₹42 crore business, more than a decade after it began commercialising Mindspark. It had to keep re-proving that testing for understanding was worth paying for.
Two pressures shaped these years.
- A slow-selling model. B2B sales into schools meant long cycles and modest ticket sizes. Ei shifted its operational centre of gravity to Bengaluru around 2008 as it built the Mindspark software business, but scale came in single-digit and low-double-digit crore increments, not leaps.
- The wrong kind of company to be, briefly. Through the late 2010s and the pandemic, Indian edtech chased direct-to-consumer growth and enormous marketing budgets. An assessments company that measured learning gaps looked dull next to platforms promising to replace school. That perception starved careful players of attention even as it inflated the loud ones.
The company did not pivot away from its core to chase that money. In hindsight that restraint reads as strategy. At the time it read as being left behind.
The turning point: a randomised trial
The single event that changed how Educational Initiatives could be sold was not a funding round. It was an experiment the company did not control. Economists Karthik Muralidharan, Abhijeet Singh and Alejandro Ganimian ran a randomised controlled trial of Mindspark in Delhi across 2015 and 2016, published as the working paper “Disrupting Education? Experimental Evidence on Technology-Aided Instruction in India”.
The design was deliberately independent: 619 middle-school students, roughly half randomly given vouchers to attend Mindspark centres for 90 minutes a day, tested on paper before and after by researchers rather than by the company. Over just 4.5 months, voucher winners scored 0.37 standard deviations higher in mathematics and 0.23 higher in Hindi than the control group — a gain the researchers described as far above typical yearly progress. The monthly cost worked out to around ₹1,000 per student, below the roughly ₹1,500 per student the government was spending in the public schools those children came from.
The numbers on each side of that trial matter. Before it, “personalised adaptive learning improves outcomes” was a marketing claim. After it, it was a peer-reviewed finding that ministries, funders and school chains could cite. Ei suddenly had something almost no edtech company had: independent, quantified evidence that its product worked.
The money behind it
Ei’s cap table is unusually staid for edtech — a reflection of the slow business underneath it. The disclosed funding shape:
- 2008 seed group — Footprint Ventures, IFMR Trust, Novak Biddle Venture Partners and industrialist Gautam Thapar backed the young company (amount undisclosed).
- August 2017 — Global Innovation Fund provided a $2.3 million grant to scale Mindspark in government schools, underwriting the impact work rather than buying equity.
- 2018 — Gaja Capital invested about $25 million (reported at roughly ₹172 crore) from its third fund to take a controlling stake. This is the round that reshaped ownership; Gaja partners Gopal Jain and Imran Jafar joined the board.
- March 2024 — HCL Group paid ₹166 crore (about $20 million) for a minority stake, buying shares from Gaja Capital in a secondary deal. HCL’s involvement brought Shikhar Malhotra and David Levin onto the board.
Two features stand out. First, the largest recent transaction was a secondary sale — money that moved between investors, not fresh capital into the company — which fits a firm that funds growth from operations rather than from repeated dilution. Second, Ei has kept its total external equity modest by edtech standards, with roughly $30 million disclosed across its rounds according to data aggregators. There is no publicly confirmed post-money valuation for the 2024 HCL deal, so this piece does not assign one.
Note on ownership: some secondary databases list additional financial shareholders, but this article names only backers confirmed in reputable reporting — chiefly Gaja Capital and HCL Group — and leaves unverified names out.
How it makes money
Educational Initiatives earns from schools and systems paying for assessment and learning software, typically on a recurring, per-student or per-school basis. The mechanics:
- Money in. Private schools pay for ASSET testing cycles and Mindspark subscriptions; governments and funders pay for large deployments in public schools; international partners pay to run the products in their markets.
- Where the margin sits. The heavy cost is building the question banks, the misconception research and the adaptive engine once; each additional student who logs in adds little marginal cost. That is a classic software-margin shape sitting on top of an unusually deep content moat.
- Costs out. Content and product research, a school-facing sales force with long cycles, and the delivery cost of assessments. Total expenses were about ₹112.4 crore in FY24 (Inc42), rising roughly in step with revenue.
- The part people get wrong. Ei is often filed under “edtech” alongside consumer tutoring apps. It is closer to an assessment-and-analytics company. Its product is the diagnosis, not the entertainment — which is why it can charge schools and stay profitable while consumer players burned cash on customer acquisition.
The numbers
Ei’s financials describe a company growing steadily and, unusually for the sector, profitably. Figures below are operating revenue and profit after tax in ₹ crore, from filings reported by Entrackr and Inc42 and company statements reported by The Economic Times.
| Fiscal year | Revenue (₹ crore) | Profit after tax (₹ crore) |
| FY21 | ~42 | Not disclosed |
| FY22 | 62 | 4.2 |
| FY23 | 97 | 5.5 |
| FY24 | 127 | 10.8 |
| FY25 | ~150 | Not disclosed |
- Revenue rose from about ₹42 crore in FY21 to about ₹150 crore in FY25 — described as roughly a 30% compound annual growth rate over that span.
- FY24 revenue was ₹127 crore, up 24.9% on FY23 (Inc42). Note a small source discrepancy: Entrackr reports FY23 operating revenue of ₹97 crore, while Inc42 gives FY23 total income of ₹101.7 crore; the difference is operating revenue versus total income.
- Profit after tax roughly doubled from ₹4.2 crore in FY22 to ₹5.5 crore in FY23 and then to ₹10.8 crore in FY24 — the company has been in the black through its growth phase, a rarity among funded Indian edtech firms.
- At FY25 revenue of about ₹150 crore (roughly $16 million at $1 ≈ ₹96.0), Ei remains a mid-sized business rather than a giant — the point being that it is a solvent one.
Where the money comes from
The revenue mix carries the surprise. For a company from Ahmedabad and Bengaluru, a large slice of income is now earned abroad.
- Geography. Around one-fifth of FY25 revenue came from the UAE market, per the company (reported by The Economic Times). International operations also span South Africa, Qatar and Kuwait, with stated plans to expand into Kenya, Ghana and Saudi Arabia.
- Customer type. Revenue splits between fee-paying private schools and large public-system deployments. The Global-Innovation-Fund-backed Rajasthan programme scaled from 40 government schools to more than 5,000 schools across 17 states, reaching around 600,000 students on Mindspark.
- Product. ASSET provides the recurring diagnostic testing relationship; Mindspark provides the higher-engagement adaptive-learning subscription. The 2025 acquisition of Pune-based Open Door Education (founded 2013), which builds science and mathematics assessments, deepens the assessment side.
The surprise for most readers: an Indian assessments company earns a meaningful share of its money from Gulf and African schools, not only from the domestic market that made it.
The risks
- Concentration in slow-moving buyers. Selling to schools and governments means long sales cycles, budget dependence and exposure to policy shifts. A government that changes its assessment priorities can remove a large deployment at renewal — the same mechanism that let Ei scale to thousands of Rajasthan schools can run in reverse.
- Geographic exposure. With about a fifth of revenue from the UAE and further growth planned in the Gulf and Africa, currency movements, local regulation and single-market education budgets become real risks. A pullback in one international market would hit growth disproportionately.
- Commoditisation by AI. Adaptive learning and question generation are exactly the tasks large language models are getting cheaper at. Ei’s moat is its two decades of misconception research and validated content; if generic AI tutors close that quality gap, the premium schools pay for a proven diagnostic could compress.
The takeaway
Educational Initiatives is a case study in choosing evidence over noise. It did not win by out-spending Byju’s or by promising to replace teachers. It won, slowly, by making a claim it could prove — that its software measurably improves how children understand — and then letting independent economists prove it. When the edtech tide went out, the company still standing was the one with a randomised trial, paying customers and a profit. The transferable lesson is not “avoid marketing”. It is that in a market flooded with claims, the rare asset is a result someone else is willing to verify. Build the thing whose value an outsider can measure, and you outlast the cycle.
Frequently asked questions
What does Educational Initiatives actually sell?
It sells assessment and adaptive-learning products to schools and education systems, not directly to parents. Its main products are Ei ASSET, a diagnostic test that checks conceptual understanding, and Ei Mindspark, an adaptive tutor for maths, English and Hindi.
Who owns Educational Initiatives?
It is a privately held company. Gaja Capital took a controlling stake in 2018, and HCL Group bought a minority stake from Gaja in a ₹166 crore secondary deal in March 2024. Co-founders including Sridhar Rajagopalan remain involved, and Pranav Kothari serves as Managing Director and CEO.
Is there real evidence that Mindspark works?
Yes. An independent randomised controlled trial in Delhi (2015–16) by economists Muralidharan, Singh and Ganimian found students using Mindspark scored 0.37 standard deviations higher in maths and 0.23 higher in Hindi over 4.5 months, at about ₹1,000 per student a month.
How big is the company financially?
Revenue was about ₹150 crore in FY25, up from roughly ₹42 crore in FY21. It reported a profit after tax of ₹10.8 crore in FY24, making it profitable through its growth phase — unusual in Indian edtech.
Does it earn money outside India?
Yes. The company has said about one-fifth of FY25 revenue came from the UAE, and it operates in markets including South Africa, Qatar and Kuwait, with plans to enter Kenya, Ghana and Saudi Arabia.
Sources
Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).
- Entrackr — “HCL invests $20 Mn in edtech firm Educational Initiatives via secondary” (March 2024): FY22/FY23 revenue and profit, HCL secondary from Gaja.
- Inc42 — Educational Initiatives company financials (2026): FY23/FY24 revenue, PAT and total expenses.
- The Economic Times / Elets Digital Learning — “Educational Initiatives acquires Open Door Education” (September 2025): FY25 revenue ~₹150 crore, FY21 ~₹42 crore, ~30% CAGR, ~20% UAE revenue, Open Door details.
- Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) — “Disrupting Education? Evidence on technology-aided instruction in India”: RCT effect sizes (0.37 SD maths, 0.23 SD Hindi), 619 students, Delhi, 4.5 months, cost per student.
- Muralidharan, Singh and Ganimian — “Disrupting Education?” NBER Working Paper 22923: authors and study design.
- Global Innovation Fund — Educational Initiatives investment page (August 2017): $2.3 million grant, Rajasthan scale-up to 5,000+ schools and ~600,000 students.
- Inc42 / DealStreetAsia / Global Private Capital — Gaja Capital 2018 investment (~$25 million / ₹172 crore, controlling stake).
- YourStory (December 2020) — company history, founders, Eklavya School origin, 2008 seed investors, Bengaluru operations.
- Tracxn — legal entity record: CIN U80211GJ2000PTC038692, incorporation date, board members.
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