KLAY Schools calls itself India’s largest non-franchised chain of preschools and daycare centres, yet the company that built its reputation on always being open had to shut every single centre overnight. In March 2020, the national COVID-19 lockdown forced KLAY’s parent, Founding Years Learning Solutions, to close all its physical sites, and revenue collapsed from ₹191.4 crore in FY20 to ₹42 crore in FY21 — a fall of nearly 78% in one year that erased almost a decade of expansion.
Three years later the company was back to ₹200 crore in revenue (FY23, unaudited), and by FY25 an independent registrar-filings tracker put group revenue at ₹277 crore (about $28.9 million at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026, Trading Economics). The comeback was not led by the founder who built the company. Priya Krishnan, who started KLAY in 2011, stepped back from day-to-day charge in the middle of the crisis, in May 2020, handing the wheel to her chief operating officer. What happened in between — and who actually steered the recovery — is the part of the KLAY story that gets skipped in most retellings.
Quick facts
| Company | Founding Years Learning Solutions Private Limited (brands: KLAY Schools, The Little Company) |
| Founded | Entity incorporated 1 June 2010; first centre opened 2011 in Whitefield, Bengaluru |
| Founder(s) | Priya Krishnan |
| Businesses | KLAY (consumer-facing preschool and daycare) and The Little Company (corporate/B2B on-site and near-site daycare) |
| Latest FY revenue | ₹277 crore (about $28.9 million), FY25, up 17.3% year-on-year (Tofler, citing RoC filings) |
| Latest FY profit/loss | Net profit up 29.73% year-on-year in FY25; absolute rupee figure not publicly disclosed (Tofler) |
| Listed | Private (unlisted) |
| Market value / last valuation | Not publicly disclosed in available filings or press reports |
| Key shareholders / CEO | AK Srikanth, CEO since May 2020; backed by Kaizenvest (Kaizen Private Equity) and Peepul Capital |
What they do
KLAY runs company-owned (not franchised) preschools and daycare centres for children roughly six months to ten years old, under two brands. KLAY itself is the consumer-facing brand: parents enrol directly at a neighbourhood or “near-home” centre for preschool, daycare and after-school care. The Little Company (TLC) is the business-to-business brand: it runs “on-site” centres inside a corporate campus and “near-work” centres near business parks, sold to employers as a benefit for staff with young children. Both brands follow a Montessori- and Reggio Emilia-influenced curriculum and compete in the premium end of Indian childcare, well above mass-market chains such as Kidzee and EuroKids on price, with annual nursery fees commonly quoted in the ₹1.2 lakh to ₹2 lakh range depending on the city and centre.
The origin
Priya Krishnan is not a career educationist. She holds a computer science degree from Mumbai University, a dual MBA from London Business School and NMIMS Mumbai, and a CFA charter, and spent her early career at Andersen Consulting, PwC, Mphasis, EDS and HP, at one point running Mphasis’ European business. The idea for KLAY came while she was doing her MBA in London as a working mother: she saw how reliable, high-quality childcare let women in other markets stay employed after having children, and concluded that urbanising India, with a fast-growing base of dual-income families in its metros, had almost none of that infrastructure. She founded Founding Years Learning Solutions and opened the first KLAY centre in Whitefield, Bengaluru, in 2011.
The company’s early targeting was itself a small pivot. KLAY initially pitched itself at expatriate and returnee families in Bengaluru’s tech corridor who wanted Western-style childcare standards. It “quickly realised”, in the company’s own later account of the period, that the same appetite for structured, premium care existed among local, dual-income Indian households — and broadened its base accordingly. That widened addressable market is what let the company scale past a single city.
The struggle years
Growth in the 2010s was real but not linear, and it came with a string of bolt-on deals and management changes that get glossed over in KLAY’s own telling. The company grew from ₹3.4 crore in revenue in FY13 to 40 centres by 2017, then to 150 centres by March 2020 and ₹191.4 crore in revenue that year. Along the way, it acquired The Little Company outright to get a foothold in the corporate-daycare segment, and in January 2018 it bought Gurgaon-based Intellitots Learning Pvt Ltd through a business transfer agreement to establish itself in the Delhi-NCR market — the kind of city-by-city bolt-on that non-franchised chains need in order to expand without diluting quality control.
Then came the two setbacks that actually tested the business. The first was a leadership handover under pressure: AK Srikanth, who had joined as chief operating officer in 2017 to drive the national roll-out, was elevated to CEO on 1 May 2020 — barely six weeks into the country’s first COVID-19 lockdown — with Krishnan stepping back from operational control to a board and shareholder role. The second, larger setback was the lockdown itself. Every KLAY and TLC centre in the country was shut in March 2020, at exactly the point the business had scaled to its widest-ever footprint. A childcare company’s entire product depends on parents being willing to physically drop children off; for the better part of a year, that was illegal or simply unwanted by frightened parents, regardless of how good the curriculum was.
The turning point
The numbers either side of the lockdown are the clearest evidence of how close the shutdown came to undoing a decade of work. FY20 revenue was ₹191.4 crore, built on 150 centres. FY21 revenue was ₹42 crore — a decline of close to 78% — even though the company did not report closing centres outright. Rather than wait out the closures, the leadership team under Srikanth rebuilt the offering around what a shut centre could still deliver at home: Learn@Home, a live online classroom built in partnership with a South Korean ed-tech platform; Kare@Home, in-home visits by KLAY teachers and caregivers, which by mid-2021 reached close to 1,000 families across seven cities — Delhi-NCR, Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad, Chennai and Bengaluru — according to YourStory, while the company’s own broader tally for at-home early-childhood outreach was 4,000 households nationally, per EducationWorld; and Klaytopia, a ₹1,999-a-month subscription activity box for children aged two to six, launched in June 2021 with a public target of reaching 100,000 households by 2023.
None of the three pivots replaced centre-based revenue at anything like the old scale on their own. What they did was keep the brand and the enrolled-family relationship alive through the worst 18 months of the business’s life, so that when centres reopened at scale, KLAY had a base to reopen into rather than a blank slate. By FY23, unaudited numbers shared by Srikanth put revenue back at ₹200 crore, with 158 centres operating as of August 2023 — recovery, but still short of a full return to the FY20 trend line two years on.
The money behind it
- 2013 — Series A, $6 million: from Kaizen Private Equity (now branded Kaizenvest), which stayed invested through the following rounds.
- 17 June 2016 — Series B, $16 million: led by Peepul Capital, with Kaizen Private Equity continuing to participate, per BW Disrupt’s report at the time.
- Early 2021 — a further ₹30 crore raised, per YourStory’s June 2021 reporting; the round’s investor was not disclosed in available reporting.
- Total disclosed funding: at least $22 million across the two priced Series rounds, plus the 2021 rupee round on top. Aggregator estimates of lifetime funding diverge — CB Insights and Crunchbase-linked trackers put the total near $22 million, while PitchBook lists a higher $32.6 million — and neither this reporting nor the company has published a reconciliation, so the range, not a single number, is the honest answer.
- Valuation: not disclosed in any filing, funding announcement or press report found for this piece. Corporate records instead show three nominee directors on the board — Sandeep Nadigadda Reddy, Sriram Kaushik Chandra and Sri Venugopala Rao Chittoory — consistent with continued private-equity board control rather than founder control.
- What each backer changed: Kaizen Private Equity’s 2013 cheque funded the initial multi-city expansion beyond Bengaluru; Peepul Capital’s larger 2016 round financed the jump from roughly 40 to 150 centres by March 2020, the scale-up that was standing in the building when the pandemic hit.
How it makes money
KLAY’s revenue model is fee-for-service, not advertising- or franchise-royalty-based, which is itself a strategic choice: the company owns and operates every centre rather than licensing its brand to third-party operators, the way Kidzee and EuroKids largely do.
- Money in: annual or term-wise tuition and daycare fees paid directly by parents at KLAY centres (₹1.2 lakh–₹2 lakh a year for a typical nursery programme, above the mass-market Kidzee/EuroKids band of roughly ₹60,000–₹1 lakh), plus contracted fees paid by corporate clients — reported to include Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble, L’Oréal, Infosys and Airtel — for The Little Company’s on-site and near-work centres.
- Costs out: real estate (lease or fit-out of every physical centre, since none are franchised), teacher and caregiver salaries in a business that is inherently staff-heavy relative to revenue per child, curriculum and training overheads, and — as the pandemic showed — a cost base that does not shrink quickly when enrolment does, because leases and staff cannot be switched off centre by centre overnight.
- Where the margin sits: in per-centre occupancy. A childcare centre’s costs are mostly fixed once it is built and staffed, so profitability turns on filling seats, not on price increases alone — which is why the FY25 filings show net profit growing faster (+29.73%) than revenue (+17.3%) even as EBITDA eased, a pattern consistent with better utilisation of an already-built network rather than fresh expansion.
- The part people get wrong: KLAY is frequently described as “India’s largest” preschool chain without qualification. By raw centre count it is not — franchised rivals Kidzee (reported at 1,900-plus centres) and EuroKids (2,200-plus centres) are far bigger networks. KLAY’s claim, made consistently by the company and by outlets such as Forbes India and Crunchbase, is to be the largest non-franchised, company-owned chain — a narrower and more defensible claim about ownership structure, not overall scale.
The numbers
| Fiscal year | Revenue (₹ crore) | Profit/loss | Centres |
| FY20 (year to Mar 2020) | 191.4 | Profitable, per company statement (Forbes India) | 150 (Mar 2020) |
| FY21 (year to Mar 2021) | 42.0 | Not reported as profitable; pandemic year | Not disclosed |
| FY23 (year to Mar 2023, unaudited) | 200.0 | Not disclosed | 158 (Aug 2023) |
| FY25 (year to Mar 2025) | 277.0 | Net profit up 29.73% YoY; absolute figure not disclosed | 160+ (2026, company site) |
- FY13→FY20: revenue grew from ₹3.4 crore to ₹191.4 crore as the network expanded from a single Bengaluru centre to 150 centres nationally (Forbes India, August 2023).
- FY20→FY21: revenue fell 78%, from ₹191.4 crore to ₹42 crore, the sharpest single-year drop in the company’s history, driven by pandemic centre closures (Forbes India).
- FY21→FY23: revenue recovered to ₹200 crore on unaudited numbers shared by CEO AK Srikanth (Forbes India).
- FY24: EBITDA rose 610.87% and book net worth rose 93.21% year-on-year off a low pandemic-hit base, though the absolute revenue figure for the year is only available as a wide ₹100–500 crore range (Tofler, citing RoC filings).
- FY25: revenue of ₹277 crore, up 17.3% year-on-year; net profit up 29.73% year-on-year; EBITDA down 24.43% year-on-year even as profit grew; net worth up 62.59% year-on-year (Tofler, citing RoC filings).
Where the money comes from
KLAY’s revenue splits along two lines that matter more than city-wise geography: brand/channel, and centre format.
- KLAY (B2C): parent-paid enrolments at neighbourhood (“near-home”) centres — the larger and more geographically spread part of the network.
- The Little Company (B2B): corporate-contracted centres in two formats — “on-site”, built inside a client’s own campus, and “near-work” or “offsite”, built near a business park to serve several corporate clients who lack on-campus space. Named corporate clients across public reporting include Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble, L’Oréal, Infosys and Airtel.
- Geographic base: the network was built out from Bengaluru (the first centre and the registered head office) and has since spread to Mumbai, Gurugram, Noida, Hyderabad, Pune, Chennai, Jaipur, Vadodara, Coimbatore and Ahmedabad — the company’s own site states 160-plus centres across 12 cities as of 2026, though a separate statistics block on the same site claims 180-plus centres across 20-plus cities, an inconsistency the company has not clarified publicly.
- The surprise: the B2B, corporate-daycare brand — The Little Company — is arguably the more defensible franchise, because it is sold to an employer’s HR budget rather than a single household’s discretionary spend, and a corporate contract is stickier and less price-sensitive than a retail parent weighing KLAY’s ₹1.2–2 lakh annual fee against a mass-market alternative a third of the price.
The risks
- Regulatory fragmentation: India has no single nationwide law governing private preschools. Registration rules for play schools exist formally in only four states — Andhra Pradesh, Jharkhand, Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra — and even the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights’ guidelines are advisory rather than binding, per legal commentary in Bar and Bench. For a company operating in a dozen-plus states, that means a dozen-plus different compliance realities rather than one national standard, with no exemption from income tax on preschool profits even though GST is exempt on the fees themselves.
- A fixed-cost business exposed to demand shocks: the FY20-to-FY21 revenue collapse was not a demand-elasticity problem, it was a physical-access problem — parents could not or would not send children to a centre at all, for reasons entirely outside KLAY’s control. Because leases, real estate fit-outs and teacher payrolls are fixed regardless of enrolment, any future shock that keeps children at home (localised lockdowns, an air-quality emergency, a public-health scare) hits this business harder and faster than most services companies.
- Competitive squeeze from both ends: roughly 89% of the Indian preschool and childcare market was privately owned as of 2025, and the market itself — valued at about $5.1 billion in 2025 per IMARC Group, with a broadly similar $5.59 billion estimate from Expert Market Research for the same year — is drawing in both franchised low-cost chains expanding into KLAY’s Tier-2/3 growth cities and private-equity-backed premium rivals such as EuroKids, owned by KKR-backed Lighthouse Learning. KLAY’s non-franchised model gives it tighter quality control but a structurally slower, more capital-intensive expansion pace than franchise-driven competitors.
The takeaway
The instructive part of KLAY’s history is not the founding insight — plenty of people correctly spotted that urban India lacked quality childcare infrastructure in the early 2010s. It is what happened when the entire premise of the business, physical centres that parents could walk their children into, became briefly illegal. The company that survived was not run by the person who built it: Priya Krishnan handed over operational control in the same month the crisis peaked, and the leadership that took over did not try to replicate the old centre-based product online. It built three smaller, worse substitutes — a video classroom, a home-visit service, an activity box — that were good enough to keep paying families attached to the brand until centres could reopen. A business built on a single physical format is more fragile than its growth curve suggests; the businesses that survive a shock to that format are the ones that can temporarily become something else without losing the customer relationship that made the original format valuable.
Frequently asked questions
Who founded KLAY Schools and when?
Priya Krishnan founded KLAY under Founding Years Learning Solutions, opening the first centre in Whitefield, Bengaluru, in 2011; the parent entity was incorporated on 1 June 2010, according to Ministry of Corporate Affairs records reviewed via Tofler and ZaubaCorp.
Is KLAY Schools India’s largest preschool chain?
KLAY and outlets such as Forbes India and Crunchbase describe it as India’s largest non-franchised, company-owned preschool and daycare chain. By total centre count, franchised rivals Kidzee (1,900-plus centres) and EuroKids (2,200-plus centres) are larger networks; KLAY’s claim is specifically about ownership structure, not overall scale.
How much funding has KLAY Schools raised?
At least $22 million across two priced rounds — a $6 million Series A from Kaizen Private Equity in 2013 and a $16 million Series B led by Peepul Capital in June 2016 — plus a further ₹30 crore raised in early 2021 per YourStory. Aggregator estimates of total lifetime funding range from about $22 million to $32.6 million depending on the source, and no valuation has been publicly disclosed.
Did KLAY Schools survive the COVID-19 pandemic?
Yes, but not without a sharp hit: revenue fell from ₹191.4 crore in FY20 to ₹42 crore in FY21, a roughly 78% drop, as every centre closed under the national lockdown. The company pivoted to at-home and online offerings (Learn@Home, Kare@Home, Klaytopia) before centre-based revenue recovered to ₹200 crore by FY23 and ₹277 crore by FY25.
Who runs KLAY Schools now?
AK Srikanth, who joined as chief operating officer in 2017, has been CEO since 1 May 2020, when founder Priya Krishnan stepped back from day-to-day operations to a board and shareholder role, according to contemporaneous reporting in BW People.
Sources
Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).
- Forbes India, “Feat of Klay: Pre-schoolers & priceless lessons”, August 2023
- Forbes.com, “Inspired By An MBA Project, This Woman Created India’s Largest Pre-School And Daycare Chain”, 19 January 2017
- BW Disrupt, “Founding Years Learning Solutions Raises $16M in Series-B Funding from Peepul Capital”, 17 June 2016
- BW People, “KLAY Schools Appoints AK Srikanth As The New CEO”, 1 May 2020
- YourStory, “From teacher@home to theme-based activities, how KLAY navigated the pandemic”, June 2021
- EducationWorld, “Home learning edupreneur: A.K. Srikanth” profile
- Business Standard (ANI wire), “Founding Years Learning Solutions acquires Intellitots Learning”, 18 January 2018
- Business Standard (ANI wire), “KLAY bets big on preschool subscription box market with launch of Klaytopia”, 18 June 2021
- Tofler, company financial profile for Founding Years Learning Solutions Private Limited (CIN U80301KA2010PTC053882), accessed September 2026
- ZaubaCorp, company profile for Founding Years Learning Solutions Private Limited, accessed September 2026
- NMIMS Online blog, “Startup Journeys: Story of Klay — Priya Krishnan Knowledge Series”
- TheCEO.in magazine, “Priya Krishnan: Ideator, Momprenuer-in-Chief, KLAY Prep Schools & Daycare”
- Bar and Bench, “No Laws to school the Pre-schools: Navigating the Path to establish Private Pre-schools in India”
- IMARC Group, “Indian Pre-School/Child Care Market” size report, 2025 figures
- Expert Market Research, “India Pre-School/Childcare Market” report, 2025 figures
- klay.co.in, “About Us” and “KLAY Presence” pages, accessed September 2026
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