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Startup Deep Dive : SpeEdLabs — from two months of runway to Rs 14.3 crore revenue

The Invincible India

SpeEdLabs booked ₹4.4 crore of revenue in FY24, less than the ₹5.1 crore it had made two years earlier, and in October 2023 it had about two months of cash left. Eighteen months on, the same company reported ₹14.3 crore for FY25, and its founder told Open magazine in May 2026 that FY26 would close at around ₹27 crore with positive EBITDA. The recovery was not bought with a large round. It was built after the team was cut from more than 400 people to 80.

That is the opposite of the standard edtech story. Between 2020 and 2022, the well-funded players raised on the promise of online lectures at scale. SpeEdLabs, run out of a third-floor office in Chandivali, Mumbai, by a former Deutsche Bank vice president, insisted that students learn by practising and that classrooms would come back. It was right about the thesis and nearly died anyway. This deep dive follows the money: where it came from, where it went, and what the numbers say about a hybrid test-prep business that survived the edtech winter on monthly drip-fed funding.

Quick facts

Company Teevra Edutech Private Limited, trading as SpeEdLabs (CIN U80904MH2015PTC266988, ROC Mumbai)
Founded Incorporated 29 July 2015; operations began February 2016 with a hybrid centre in Powai, Mumbai
Founder(s) Vivek Varshney (founder, managing director); Tanushree Varshney (director since incorporation, listed as co-founder by Inc42). Tracxn lists Praveen Gadelli as a co-founder
Businesses AI-driven adaptive practice platform for grades 6 to 12, JEE and NEET prep; School Integrated Program for schools; Advantage Program for coaching centres; QR-linked printed workbooks; a company-run centre in Powai
FY25 revenue ₹14.3 crore, up 223.6% on FY24’s ₹4.4 crore (Inc42, from MCA filings)
FY25 profit/loss Net loss of ₹3.0 crore on expenses of ₹17.2 crore (Inc42, from MCA filings); company says EBITDA turned positive
Listed Private
Last valuation Undisclosed. Total raised: $2.5 million as per the May 2022 announcement; Tracxn records $8.76 million across 13 rounds to November 2025
Key shareholders Founders 31.0%, funds 33.9%, other investors 18.4%, enterprises 5.3%, angels 3.2%, ESOP pool 2.5% (Tracxn, MCA-derived). Backers include 35North Ventures (India Discovery Fund), Mumbai Angels, LetsVenture, ah! Ventures, Ecosystem Ventures, SucSEED Venture Partners, Haldiram family office

What SpeEdLabs does

SpeEdLabs sells structured practice, not lectures. Its core product is an adaptive question engine that sits on top of a seven-level content hierarchy (course down to individual concept) and picks the next question based on what a student got wrong, as the founder described it to TechStory in March 2022. Around that engine the company has built printed workbooks with QR codes that open videos and hints, chapter-wise and full-syllabus test series, a teacher app with more than 2 lakh pre-loaded questions, and live problem-solving sessions taken by IIT and NIT faculty. The buyers are three kinds of institution and one kind of household: coaching centres in smaller cities that cannot build their own question banks, schools that want an in-timetable JEE, NEET and Olympiad foundation programme, tuition teachers, and parents of students in grades 6 to 12 preparing for CBSE and ICSE boards, JEE and NEET. The company’s website in September 2026 claims a presence in more than 400 cities, more than 5 lakh questions in its bank, and more than 50 million questions attempted on the platform. Those are company-stated figures and have not been independently audited.

The origin: a banker who taught in Kota

Vivek Varshney grew up in Kasganj, Uttar Pradesh, and studied mechanical engineering at IIT Kanpur between 1998 and 2002. As he told Open magazine, he collected 14 job rejections after graduating and took the one offer he had: teaching in Kota, Rajasthan, for ₹40,000 a month. That stint inside the coaching machine came before an MBA at IIM Lucknow (2003 to 2005) and a decade in finance. He worked in equity research at Morgan Stanley, in private equity at Deutsche Bank and ICICI Venture, and finally as a vice president at Deutsche Bank from 2011 to 2016, with a salary that Open reports was approaching ₹1 crore a year when he left.

The founding insight came from Kota, not from a spreadsheet. Varshney’s argument, repeated to Forbes India in June 2022, is that most of the learning gain in test prep comes from self-study and practice, not from the lecture. He put the figure at 70 percent. If that is true, then the product that matters is the one that tells a student what to practise next, and tells the teacher which student is stuck on which concept. Lectures are a commodity; feedback loops are not. The company later published an international patent application for what it calls “Hybrid Pedagogy”, as it told TechStory in March 2022.

He started in February 2016 with ₹40 lakh of his own savings and ₹40 lakh from friends, and opened a single hybrid centre in Powai, Mumbai, where he taught classes himself. The centre was deliberately kept as a pilot for about three years, per Forbes India, while the software was built around what happened in the room. Revenue was small and slow: ₹27 lakh in FY17, ₹1.6 crore by FY19, according to figures Varshney gave Open magazine. The decision that defined the next decade was made in this period: SpeEdLabs would not become an online school. It would sell its engine to other people’s classrooms.

The struggle years

The first setback was the pandemic, and it cut both ways. When schools and coaching centres shut in March 2020, a business built on hybrid classrooms lost its physical half overnight. Revenue still grew, to ₹2.7 crore in FY21 and ₹5.1 crore in FY22 (Forbes India, June 2022), but the market’s money went elsewhere. Investors were funding online lecture platforms at record valuations, and Varshney was publicly calling online lectures “the biggest fraud perpetrated during the pandemic” in a Forbes India interview. Being contrarian in a boom is expensive: the company raised about $4 million in total by mid-2022, as per Forbes India, at a time when competitors raised that in a week.

The second setback was self-inflicted, and it followed the money that did arrive. In May 2022 the company closed a $2.5 million pre-Series round led by 35North Ventures’ India Discovery Fund, and told Entrepreneur India it had more than 3,000 B2B tutorial clients across 200-plus cities, a projected monthly revenue of ₹1.5 crore by June 2022, and a plan to reach 800 locations across 23 states. Forbes India reported a claimed FY23 revenue run rate of ₹25 crore. The company hired to that plan and headcount crossed 400, per Open magazine. The filings tell a different story: MCA-derived data on Tracxn puts FY23 revenue at about ₹6.0 crore, up 17.8 percent on FY22, and FY24 revenue fell to ₹4.4 crore (Inc42). The run rate never became a year.

What went wrong was not demand for the pitch but stickiness of the product. Open magazine’s May 2026 account is unusually candid for a founder profile: the product “wasn’t settling into daily use”, students were not engaging deeply enough, coaching partners were not integrating it into their core workflow, retention slipped and renewal conversations “didn’t close cleanly”. In the founder’s own words, this “wasn’t product-market fit. Not yet.” Meanwhile the sector turned. Tracxn data cited by Entrepreneur India in December 2023 showed Indian edtech funding down 48 percent to $971 million in the first eight months of 2023, with the number of rounds down 77 percent year on year. A company burning to a plan drawn in the 2022 boom was now running on 2023 money that did not exist.

The turning point: October 2023

By October 2023 the arithmetic was simple and lethal, as Varshney laid it out to Open magazine. Monthly burn was close to ₹2 crore. A $2 million investor commitment the company had been counting on had vanished. New investors were not turning up and existing ones “had gone cold”. There were about two months of runway. Varshney, then 42, borrowed roughly ₹2 crore from friends to keep salaries going, developed diabetes under the stress, and went back to his cap table with a sentence he says he repeated to every investor: “Right now, the question is survival, not valuation.”

The response was an internal round of roughly $1 million, but not as a cheque. The money was released monthly, each tranche conditional on progress shown in the previous month. Open describes the rhythm: twenty days of building, fixing and closing whatever business could be closed, then ten days of convincing investors to release the next month. That went on for about eight months. In parallel the team was cut from more than 400 to 80, and the growth experiments that had not proven themselves were shut. The one board-level fact that survives in the public record is that Ashwani Kumar Singh, managing partner at 35North Ventures and described by Open as one of the early backers, has sat on the Teevra Edutech board since 1 September 2022, per MCA data on Tracxn.

The numbers either side of that October are the whole story. Before: FY24 revenue of ₹4.4 crore, burn of about ₹2 crore a month, 400-plus staff. After: FY25 revenue of ₹14.3 crore (Inc42, MCA-derived), a claimed move to operational break-even with positive EBITDA in FY25 (Open magazine), and a company-estimated FY26 of around ₹27 crore revenue and ₹2.8 crore EBITDA. Growth resumed only after the business stopped selling to everyone and narrowed to the schools and coaching partners that were already using the product every week.

The money behind it

SpeEdLabs has never raised a priced Series A. Its capital came in small, frequent pieces from angels, angel platforms and micro-VCs, which is why the total varies by database. Rounds and backers in the public record:

What each backer changed is visible in the timeline. The angel platforms kept the company alive through the pilot years without forcing a pivot to online. 35North’s 2022 round funded the hiring binge that nearly killed it, and then 35North’s managing partner was on the board when the bridge was negotiated. Total raised is contested: Inc42 and CB Insights count $2.5 million and $1.85 million respectively from the disclosed rounds; Forbes India reported $4 million as of June 2022; Tracxn’s tally is $8.76 million across 13 rounds from 166 investors (40 institutional, 126 angels). Valuation has never been disclosed. The MCA-derived shareholding on Tracxn shows founders holding 31.0 percent, funds 33.9 percent and other investors 18.4 percent, which is consistent with a company that has raised a low single-digit crore multiple of its paid-up capital of ₹79.2 lakh (Tofler).

How SpeEdLabs makes money

The model is B2B2C: the institution buys, the student uses. Public pricing is thin, so here is what the record supports.

Money out is mostly people and content. In FY25 total expenses were ₹17.2 crore against ₹14.3 crore of revenue (Inc42, MCA-derived), a 20.8 percent negative net margin. The part people get wrong is the word “profitable”. The company and its founder speak of operational break-even and positive EBITDA in FY25; the filings show a ₹3.0 crore net loss in the same year. Both can be true. EBITDA excludes depreciation, interest, ESOP charges and one-offs, and Inc42’s own FY25 EBITDA estimate is a slim ₹52.5 lakh. The margin, where it exists, sits in the software layer: once the question bank and the adaptive engine are built, each additional coaching partner costs printing, onboarding and support, not teachers. The Powai centre and live faculty sessions carry the heavier variable cost.

The numbers

Revenue figures below are from company filings as reported by Inc42 and Tracxn, and from figures the founder gave Forbes India and Open magazine. Net loss is only reliably reported for FY25; earlier years are marked where the public record is silent.

Year Revenue (₹ crore) Net profit/loss (₹ crore) Source
FY22 5.1 Not publicly reported Forbes India (June 2022); Open magazine (May 2026)
FY23 About 6.0 (up 17.8%) Not publicly reported Tracxn, MCA-derived
FY24 4.4 (down about 27%) Loss of about 1.8 (implied: Inc42 reports the FY25 loss as 68% wider than FY24) Inc42; Open magazine
FY25 14.3 (up 223.6%) Loss of 3.0; expenses 17.2; total assets 28.3 Inc42, MCA-derived
FY26 (company estimate) About 27 (roughly $2.8 million) EBITDA of about 2.8; net figure not disclosed Open magazine (May 2026); Tracxn revenue band ₹10 to ₹50 crore, 90% one-year growth

Where the money comes from

SpeEdLabs does not publish a segment or geography split, and no filing in the public record breaks revenue down by channel. What can be established:

The surprise is where the growth did not come from. Ten years in, SpeEdLabs still operates essentially one centre of its own. The 2022 plan to reach 800 locations was never executed as company-run sites. Everything that scaled, from ₹4.4 crore to a claimed ₹27 crore, scaled through other people’s classrooms in cities where the well-funded online brands had the least presence. The company is, in effect, a software and content supplier to India’s unbranded coaching economy.

The risks

The takeaway

The transferable lesson from SpeEdLabs is about the difference between being right and being funded, and about which one keeps you alive. Varshney’s thesis, that practice beats lectures and that Indian test prep would return to physical rooms, was vindicated by 2023. It did not matter. What nearly killed the company was not the thesis but the decision to spend against a run rate instead of against booked, renewing revenue. A ₹25 crore run rate on a ₹6 crore year is a forecast, and forecasts do not pay salaries in October.

The recovery is equally instructive because of how ordinary it was. No new product, no pivot to a hotter category, no large cheque. The company cut to the 80 people its revenue could carry, sold only to the customers who were already using the product weekly, and accepted eight months of capital released one month at a time. Revenue tripled after headcount fell by four-fifths, which is the clearest evidence in the record that the earlier headcount was not producing revenue. For any founder in a sector coming off a funding boom, the practical rule is this: size the cost base to the revenue that has already renewed, not the revenue that has been pitched. Everything SpeEdLabs got right in 2016 was still true in 2023. It simply had to survive long enough for the market to agree.

Frequently asked questions

Who owns SpeEdLabs and is it profitable?

SpeEdLabs is the brand of Teevra Edutech Private Limited, a Mumbai company incorporated on 29 July 2015. Per MCA-derived data on Tracxn, founders hold 31.0 percent, funds 33.9 percent, other investors 18.4 percent, enterprises 5.3 percent, angels 3.2 percent and an ESOP pool 2.5 percent. On filings it is not yet profitable: Inc42 reports a ₹3.0 crore net loss on ₹14.3 crore revenue in FY25. The company says EBITDA turned positive in FY25 and estimates ₹2.8 crore of EBITDA on about ₹27 crore of revenue for FY26.

How much funding has SpeEdLabs raised?

The only round announced with a figure was a $2.5 million cumulative pre-Series round in May 2022 led by 35North Ventures’ India Discovery Fund. Forbes India put total funding at $4 million in June 2022. Open magazine reports a further internal bridge of roughly $1 million disbursed monthly from late 2023. Tracxn’s database tallies $8.76 million across 13 rounds to November 2025, but the individual amounts are unconfirmed. Valuation has never been disclosed.

What happened to SpeEdLabs in 2023?

By October 2023, according to the founder’s account to Open magazine, the company was burning close to ₹2 crore a month with about two months of runway after a $2 million investor commitment fell through. The team was cut from more than 400 to 80, the founder borrowed about ₹2 crore from friends, and existing investors funded an internal round of about $1 million released one month at a time for roughly eight months.

How is SpeEdLabs different from BYJU’S or Physics Wallah?

SpeEdLabs does not primarily sell lectures to students. It sells an adaptive practice engine, test series, teacher tools and printed QR-linked workbooks to coaching centres and schools, which then teach with it. The founder argued to Forbes India in June 2022 that about 70 percent of learning gain comes from practice rather than lectures, and that online-only lectures were a pandemic-era distortion. More than 70 percent of its clients were in tier 2 and tier 3 cities as of 2022.

What does SpeEdLabs cost for a student?

The company does not publish institutional pricing; coaching centres and schools buy through enquiry. Preqin’s profile lists two undated retail plans at ₹12,000 (Select) and ₹24,000 (Premium). Instalment options have been offered through fintech partners including BharatX and Razorpay, per a March 2022 TechStory interview.

Sources

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

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