Startup Deep Dive : Next Education — how school closures cut its revenue from Rs 270 crore to Rs 87 crore

Next Education’s revenue fell from about ₹276 crore (roughly $29 million at $1 ≈ ₹96.0) in the year to March 2019 to just ₹87 crore in the pandemic year that followed — a drop of nearly two-thirds — for one blunt reason: its flagship product needed a physical classroom to sell into, and India’s classrooms were shut. The company that had spent a decade wiring up smart boards suddenly had nowhere to put them.

The second surprise is in the cap table. Next Education is often filed under “bootstrapped” edtech, yet data platform Tracxn records roughly $73.2 million of angel money raised across six rounds between 2009 and 2022, most of it traced to Anurag Dikshit, the India-born co-founder of online-poker firm PartyGaming. This deep dive traces how a Hyderabad classroom-technology business founded in 2007 — older than BYJU’S, older than the smartphone in India — scaled to 18,000 schools on company-stated numbers, then had its model tested to breaking point, and is careful throughout to mark which figures are audited, which are company-stated, and which are only available as ranges.

Quick facts

What Next Education does

Next Education sells classroom technology and digital content to K-12 schools — the physical, teacher-led kind, not the app-only tutoring that dominated Indian edtech headlines. Its customer is the school, and increasingly the parent, rather than a student studying alone on a phone. The product line is deliberately end-to-end:

• TeachNext — the flagship digital-classroom system: a smart board or projector setup loaded with mapped, syllabus-aligned audio-visual lessons for the teacher to run in class.
• LearnNext / Next Learning Platform — self-study and adaptive-learning products for students at home, extending the classroom content to the device.
• NextBooks and NextCurriculum — a textbook series and full curriculum solution, so a school can buy content and delivery together.
• NextERP — cloud school-management software for admissions, fees, attendance and administration.
• NextLabs, KinderNext / NextPlay, Computer Masti — experiential science labs, a pre-primary programme, and a computer-science curriculum (the last acquired with InOpen).

Company-stated reach, per its own website and profile pages, is more than 18,000 partner schools, over 12 million students and around 240,000 teachers across 20-plus Indian states, plus a Middle East presence run out of Dubai. The company also claims to touch roughly 10% of India’s private-school children. Treat these as company-stated marketing figures, not audited counts.

The founding insight

Beas Dev Ralhan and Raveendranath Kamath founded Next Education in Hyderabad in 2007. The two are technologists first: Ralhan holds a degree from IIT Bombay and an MBA from London Business School; Kamath is an IIT Kharagpur alumnus with a long career in finance and operations. By several accounts they met while working at the gaming company PartyGaming, and shared an interest in using technology for social impact.

The founding logic was almost an elimination exercise. When Ralhan returned to India in 2007, the internet economy was in its infancy, smartphones were rare, and the startup ecosystem barely existed. Looking at which large sectors technology had not yet reached, the founders reasoned that retail and finance were heavily regulated and hard to enter, which left education. Their bet was specific and, for the time, contrarian: the leverage point in Indian schooling was not the individual learner with a device — because almost nobody had a device — but the teacher at the front of the room. If you could hand teachers ready-made, syllabus-mapped digital lessons and the hardware to play them, you could improve millions of classrooms without waiting for households to come online. That single choice — sell into the classroom, not around it — shaped everything that came after, including the vulnerability the pandemic would later expose.

The struggle years

Building a hardware-and-content business in Indian schools in the late 2000s was slow, capital-hungry work, and Next Education spent years grinding against structural friction rather than enjoying a clean growth curve.

• Device penetration was the first wall. Selling smart boards and projectors into schools that often lacked reliable electricity or budgets meant long sales cycles and heavy on-ground service — the company still describes a support and engineering workforce numbering in the hundreds.
• Skepticism about technology in teaching. Parents and school owners weighed classroom technology against familiar private tuition, and awareness of an integrated content-plus-device approach was low, forcing years of market education before a sale.
• Inorganic bets to fill gaps. To broaden its content, Next Education acquired InOpen Technologies in February 2016, the IIT Bombay-incubated firm behind the Computer Masti computing curriculum, and the after-school platform Xolvr in December 2016.

Through this period the company grew without institutional venture capital, leaning instead on repeated angel infusions (detailed below). Even so, it reached real scale: company-stated turnover was about ₹276 crore in the year to March 2019, and the founders have said the business grew at roughly 10% a year for much of its life. The struggle years were not about survival on fumes; they were about the sheer cost and patience of putting hardware and support staff into tens of thousands of physical schools, one deal at a time. That same physical footprint is what made the next shock so severe.

The turning point

The turning point was not a funding round or a launch. It was the closure of India’s schools in 2020, and it hit Next Education harder than the app-first edtechs it is usually grouped with.

The numbers the CEO himself gave the trade press make the shape plain. Speaking to IT Voice in December 2022, Beas Dev Ralhan described a pre-pandemic business of about ₹270 crore, a pandemic-year collapse to roughly ₹87 crore, and a post-Covid recovery to about ₹200 crore in the then-current financial year. In other words, when classrooms shut, a company built to sell into classrooms lost close to two-thirds of its revenue in a single year — while online-tutoring rivals, whose whole product lived on a screen, saw demand surge. The contradiction that defines Next Education is right here: the very focus on the physical classroom that had been its strength became, overnight, its single greatest liability. The recovery to ₹200 crore showed the customer relationships survived; but as the later filings show, getting back to the old peak has been slow and uneven.

The money behind it

Next Education is unusual for an edtech of its age: it never raised a marquee institutional venture round, and is frequently mislabelled as bootstrapped. The fuller picture, per Tracxn, is a long series of angel cheques dominated by one backer.

• Total raised: about $73.2 million across six rounds, all classified as angel or seed stage, between March 2009 and March 2022 (Tracxn).
• The rounds: roughly $7.56M (March 2009), $3.98M (November 2009), $8.95M (March 2011), $4.18M (October 2013), $7.92M (November 2014) and $4.14M (March 2022), per Tracxn’s round history.
• The anchor backer: Anurag Dikshit, the India-born co-founder of online-gaming company PartyGaming, is named as lead on multiple rounds — a reminder that the “angel” here was a technology billionaire, not a syndicate of small investors.
• Capital structure: authorised share capital of ₹41 crore and paid-up capital of ₹34.5 crore (Tracxn), consistent with a company funded steadily over time rather than in one large priced round.

No public post-money valuation has been disclosed. The practical effect of the angel-heavy structure is that Next Education avoided the growth-at-all-costs pressure that pushed venture-backed edtechs into heavy marketing spend — but it also lacked the deep institutional balance sheet that helped some rivals absorb the pandemic shock.

How it makes money

Next Education earns from schools and, to a smaller degree, directly from students and parents. The model blends up-front hardware with recurring content and software:

• Classroom hardware plus content (TeachNext). Schools pay for the smart-board or projector setup and for the mapped lesson content that runs on it, typically on multi-year contracts — the closest thing to a recurring revenue base.
• Software subscriptions (NextERP). Cloud school-management software billed to the institution, a stickier, higher-margin line than one-off hardware.
• Content and textbooks (NextBooks, NextCurriculum, NextLabs). Recurring per-student or per-school content sales, plus lab equipment and consumables.
• Direct-to-consumer (LearnNext, Next Learning Platform). Self-study subscriptions sold to households, the segment most exposed to the app-based competition.

The part people get wrong is where the fragility sits. Because so much of the value is tied to the physical classroom — hardware installed on site, content designed for a teacher to run in a room — revenue is coupled to schools being open and spending. That coupling is what makes the model resilient in normal times (long contracts, high switching costs once a school standardises on TeachNext) and acutely vulnerable in an abnormal one, as 2020 proved. Detailed margin and take-rate disclosures are not public, so this is a structural read rather than a line-by-line one.

The numbers

Next Education is a private company, and its granular audited profit-and-loss statements sit behind paid data-service paywalls (Tofler Pro, Kredible). What is verifiable is a set of revenue signposts — some company-stated, some from filing-based data services — that together show a clear rise, a pandemic crash, and a slow, incomplete recovery. Figures are in ₹ crore.

Two things stand out. First, the pandemic reversed roughly a decade of compounding: from about ₹270 crore to about ₹87 crore and back toward ₹200 crore within three years. Second, the recovery has stalled short of the old peak — Tofler’s filing-based read puts FY25 revenue in the ₹100–150 crore band and falling about 22.3% year on year, with total assets of ₹106 crore and a sharply reduced book net worth. Against that backdrop, the founder’s December 2022 public targets — 5X growth in FY25 and a ₹1,000 crore revenue ambition — look, on the available filing data, to have been missed by a wide margin. Detailed net-profit or net-loss figures are not disclosed for free, so this piece does not state a profit number it cannot source.

Where the money comes from

Next Education does not publish an audited segment or geography split, so the following is drawn from company-stated descriptions and should be read as directional rather than as a reported breakdown:

• Schools are the core. The bulk of revenue comes from institutional sales — TeachNext classroom systems, NextERP software and content — not from direct-to-consumer apps, which distinguishes it from the B2C tutoring names.
• India dominates, with a Middle East tail. Operations span 20-plus Indian states from hubs in Hyderabad, Noida and Kochi, with an overseas presence run out of Dubai; the company-stated 18,000-school and 12-million-student figures are overwhelmingly Indian.
• The surprise: for a business branded as “edtech”, a large share of value is old-economy — hardware, on-site installation and a support workforce numbering in the hundreds. That is why the company employs a headcount reported at roughly 2,800 (Tracxn), far larger than an app-only edtech of similar revenue would need.

The risks

• Revenue tied to open, spending schools. The pandemic proved the mechanism directly: with schools shut, revenue fell from about ₹270 crore to about ₹87 crore in a year. Any future disruption to in-person schooling, or a squeeze on school technology budgets, hits Next Education more than it hits screen-only rivals.
• A stalled, shrinking top line. On Tofler’s filing-based data, FY25 revenue sat in the ₹100–150 crore band and fell about 22.3% year on year, well below the pre-pandemic ~₹270 crore peak — a signal that the recovery has not only stalled but reversed, with book net worth reported sharply lower.
• Concentrated, ageing capital base. With about $73.2 million raised almost entirely as angel money and the last round dated March 2022, the company has no recent institutional round or public valuation to point to. If it needs growth capital to re-accelerate, it would be raising into a cautious post-BYJU’S edtech funding market against competitors such as LEAD and Extramarks that operate at larger scale.

The takeaway

Next Education is a lesson in the double edge of a focused distribution bet. Choosing the classroom over the consumer device in 2007 was smart and durable: it built long contracts, high switching costs and a genuine national footprint, and it did so on angel money rather than the venture treadmill. But the same decision concentrated the company’s fate on a single condition — that schools stay open and keep spending — and when that condition failed, no amount of content quality could stop revenue falling by two-thirds in a year. The transferable point is not “avoid hardware” or “avoid B2B”. It is that a distribution channel deep enough to be a moat is also deep enough to be a single point of failure, and that the time to diversify it is while the channel is still working, not after it breaks.

Frequently asked questions

What does Next Education do?

Next Education is a Hyderabad-based K-12 education-technology company founded in 2007. It sells classroom technology and digital content to schools — smart-board systems (TeachNext), curriculum and textbooks, school-management software (NextERP), science labs and self-learning products — primarily to institutions rather than directly to individual students.

Who founded Next Education and who runs it?

It was co-founded in 2007 by Beas Dev Ralhan, an IIT Bombay and London Business School graduate who is the CEO, and Raveendranath Kamath, an IIT Kharagpur alumnus who is the CFO. Daljit Singh is listed among the company’s directors.

How much money has Next Education raised, and is it a unicorn?

No. Data platform Tracxn records about $73.2 million raised across six angel or seed rounds between 2009 and 2022, much of it linked to Anurag Dikshit, the India-born PartyGaming co-founder. There is no public billion-dollar valuation; the company is private and has not disclosed a recent valuation.

How did Covid-19 affect Next Education?

Severely. Because its core product is built for physical classrooms, the CEO has said revenue fell from roughly ₹270 crore before the pandemic to about ₹87 crore in the pandemic year, before recovering to around ₹200 crore. Filing-based data suggests FY25 revenue then slipped back into the ₹100–150 crore range.

What is Next Education’s latest revenue?

Data service Tofler, drawing on MCA filings, places revenue for the year to March 2025 in the ₹100–150 crore band, down about 22.3% year on year, with total assets of ₹106 crore. Detailed audited profit or loss figures are not publicly available for free.

Sources

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

• ZaubaCorp — Next Education India Private Limited registration (CIN, incorporation date), accessed September 2026
• Tracxn — Next Education company and legal-entity profile: funding rounds, investors, employee count, capital (September 2026)
• Tofler — Next Education India Private Limited financials: FY25 revenue range, total assets, net-worth change (September 2026)
• IT Voice — “Next Education targets to record 5X growth in the fiscal year 2024-2025” (December 2022), CEO-stated revenue figures and targets
• StartupTalky — Next Education success story: founding, products, FY19 turnover, acquisitions (accessed September 2026)
• GetLatka — Next Education revenue and employee estimates (accessed September 2026)
• Next Education official website (nexteducation.in) — company-stated scale, products, offices (accessed September 2026)
• Trading Economics — USD/INR reference rate, 18 September 2026

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