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Startup Deep Dive : STEMpedia — revenue up 73% on just $111,000 raised

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The Invincible India Startup Deep Dive featured graphic for STEMpedia.

STEMpedia, the Ahmedabad-based maker of the Quarky robot and the PictoBlox coding app, has taken exactly $111,000 in institutional funding since its first product shipped in 2016. In the year to March 2024, its holding company, Agilo Research Private Limited, grew revenue 73.4% to Rs 24.4 crore ($2.5 million, at $1 ≈ Rs 96.0 as of 18 September 2026, Trading Economics), turned a profit after tax of Rs 1.9 crore, and says its software and kits have reached more than 3 million students across 70-plus countries.

That combination of wide reach, real profit and almost no outside capital sits oddly next to the DIY-robotics category it competes in globally, where better-capitalised rivals such as littleBits and Pi-Top raised tens of millions of dollars in venture funding. STEMpedia’s own numbers also turned choppier in the year that followed: profit fell even as revenue kept climbing. This piece works through that wrinkle using the company’s own regulatory filings, three crowdfunding campaigns and its growing list of contracts with Indian state governments.

Quick facts

Company STEMpedia; legal entity Agilo Research Private Limited (CIN U31900GJ2017PTC095963)
Founded 27 February 2017 (incorporation), Ahmedabad; product work traced to late 2015 as an IIT Kanpur student project
Founder(s) Dhrupal R Shah (CEO), Pankaj Kumar Verma (CTO), Abhishek Sharma and Akshat Agarwal, all IIT Kanpur alumni
Businesses Robotics and electronics kits (Quarky, evive, Wizbot Maxx); PictoBlox coding-and-AI software; school and government STEM-lab programmes; the Codeavour competition
Latest FY revenue Rs 24.4 crore in FY24 (year to 31 March 2024), up 73.4% year-on-year; reported at roughly Rs 37 crore in FY25, pending confirmed filings
Latest FY profit/loss Profit after tax of Rs 1.9 crore in FY24 (net margin 8.0%); FY25 profit fell an estimated 26.0% year-on-year even as revenue rose
Listed Private; no IPO
Market value / last valuation Not disclosed. Total institutional funding raised: $111,000 (Seed round, 14 May 2018)
Key shareholders / CEO Dhrupal R Shah (CEO); founders hold about 86.8% of the company per the most recent shareholding snapshot available

What they do

STEMpedia sells two connected things: physical kits that teach robotics, electronics and artificial intelligence through building and play, and PictoBlox, the coding and AI software that drives them. Quarky, the company’s flagship reprogrammable robot, ships in two base variants and pairs with add-on kits modelled on a Mars rover and a humanoid; evive, its original product, is a portable electronics-prototyping board built around an Arduino Mega; Wizbot Maxx is a screen-free coding toy aimed at younger children. Buyers range from individual parents ordering through Amazon, Kickstarter or Indiegogo, to schools that license PictoBlox for classroom use, to Indian state education departments and corporate CSR programmes that pay STEMpedia to install robotics and virtual-reality labs and train teachers at scale.

The origin

The company began, as so many hardware startups do, as an unglamorous fix for the founders’ own frustration. Towards the end of 2015, a group of engineering students at IIT Kanpur – Dhrupal R Shah, Pankaj Kumar Verma and Abhishek Sharma among them – found that teaching themselves electronics and robotics meant wrestling with breadboards, loose wires and a pile of separate modules for Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and sensors every time they started a new project. Between them they had already spent years building robots for college competitions, and had worked on internship and consulting projects with organisations including Boeing, GE, ISRO and Reliance Industries, according to the company’s own account of its history. Rather than keep fighting the same wiring problem, they designed evive: a single portable board with a built-in screen, oscilloscope, breadboard and power supply, so a beginner could prototype without buying and wiring ten separate parts. It shipped first to a global audience on Indiegogo in mid-2016, drawing orders from more than 35 countries and winning the Hackaday Automation Challenge that year – the first sign that a niche college project had a market well beyond IIT Kanpur’s hostels.

The struggle years

What followed was less a single crisis than a long stretch of doing more with less. The founders built and shipped evive without a conventional funding cushion, financing production largely through the Indiegogo pre-orders themselves – a model that leaves almost no room for error on manufacturing timelines or component costs, and one they repeated with a second Indiegogo campaign for the broader STEMpedia platform in 2019. When institutional money finally arrived, on 14 May 2018, it amounted to just $111,000 in a single seed round – not enough, by the standard of even modest Indian seed rounds, to hire aggressively or build a large inventory buffer, and it remains the company’s only disclosed equity round to date. The strain of growing without that buffer shows up later in the numbers too: company filings analysed by Tofler show profit after tax falling roughly 26.0% in FY25 even as revenue kept rising, alongside a 137.8% year-on-year jump in borrowings – the clearest sign yet that STEMpedia has had to lean on debt, not equity, to fund its expansion. Headcount data compiled by Tracxn tells a similar story: after peaking earlier, the company’s reported employee count slipped from 51 in August 2025 to 46 by May 2026, even as revenue grew, consistent with a company trimming costs rather than spending its way to scale.

The turning point

If there is a single event that moved STEMpedia from a niche prototyping brand to the AI-and-robotics education company it is today, it was the Kickstarter launch of Quarky. After showing an early version of the robot at CES 2020 and using the response to refine the product, the company put Quarky up on Kickstarter on 17 August 2021 with a modest goal of $10,000. By the time the campaign closed on 18 September 2021, 301 backers had pledged $55,005 – more than five-and-a-half times the target – validating a product built around AI concepts such as object detection, face recognition and machine learning for children as young as seven. That was a small sum in absolute dollars, but it did two things a seed round could not have: it proved, with paying customers rather than investor conviction, that families and schools would pay for an AI-teaching robot, and it gave STEMpedia a cash-generating product to build a software and curriculum business around. The numbers on either side of that campaign make the case – from a company that, a year earlier, had one crowdfunded hardware line and a modest institutional funding history, to one reporting Rs 24.4 crore in revenue and 3 million-plus students reached within a few years of Quarky’s launch.

The money behind it

How it makes money

Strip away the robots and the acronyms, and STEMpedia runs a fairly conventional hardware-plus-software-plus-services business, with the services piece doing more work than its marketing suggests.

The part people tend to get wrong is assuming a robot-kit company mostly sells toys. On the evidence of its own case studies – hundreds of schools across three or four Indian states, run through government and CSR budgets rather than parents’ wallets – a meaningful share of STEMpedia’s growth looks like it is coming from institutional contracts, not consumer sales, even though the robots are what get the press coverage. Filings show EBITDA growing faster than revenue in FY24, up an estimated 124% year-on-year according to Tofler’s analysis of the company’s MCA filings, which is consistent with a kit-and-software model that carries lower incremental costs once the initial lab or curriculum contract is won.

The numbers

Agilo Research Private Limited, standalone financials, Rs crore
Fiscal year Revenue Profit after tax
FY23 (year to 31 Mar 2023) 14.0 ~0.8 (implied by Inc42’s reported 142% PAT growth rate for FY24)
FY24 (year to 31 Mar 2024) 24.4 1.9
FY25 (year to 31 Mar 2025) ~37 (reported estimate, pending confirmed public filing) ~1.4 (estimated, applying Tofler’s reported 26.0% year-on-year decline to the FY24 base)

Where the money comes from

The surprise in STEMpedia’s numbers is less about which product sells and more about who is buying it. A company that raised its entire institutional funding history in Indian rupees equivalent to a rounding error on a Series A has, by its own account, a genuinely global and multi-channel customer base.

The risks

The takeaway

The lesson STEMpedia’s own numbers point to is not that bootstrapping is always better than raising venture money – its recent profit decline and rising borrowings argue against romanticising the thin capital base. The more useful lesson is narrower: a hardware-and-software education company can build real, profitable scale by treating government and institutional buyers, not individual parents, as its primary customer, and by letting crowdfunding campaigns double as market research and working capital rather than as a substitute for later fundraising. That combination let three IIT Kanpur students turn a wiring problem from 2015 into a company reaching millions of students without ever taking a large funding round – but it also means the next stage of growth will test whether the business can keep expanding on government contracts and debt alone, or whether it eventually needs the kind of capital its global rivals raised years ago.

Frequently asked questions

What does STEMpedia actually sell?

Robotics and electronics kits such as Quarky and evive, the free PictoBlox coding-and-AI software that runs them, and paid school and government programmes that install STEM and VR labs and train teachers.

How much funding has STEMpedia raised?

Its only disclosed institutional round was a $111,000 seed round on 14 May 2018, per Crunchbase and Tracxn. The company has not disclosed any equity round since, and Inc42 lists it as bootstrapped.

Is STEMpedia profitable?

It reported a profit after tax of Rs 1.9 crore on revenue of Rs 24.4 crore in FY24, an 8.0% net margin, per Inc42’s reading of its filings. Profit is reported to have fallen roughly 26.0% year-on-year in FY25 even as revenue kept growing, per Tofler.

Who founded STEMpedia and when?

Dhrupal R Shah, Pankaj Kumar Verma, Abhishek Sharma and Akshat Agarwal, all IIT Kanpur alumni, began work on the company’s first product, evive, in late 2015; the legal entity, Agilo Research Private Limited, was incorporated on 27 February 2017.

Is STEMpedia listed on a stock exchange?

No. It is a private company with no disclosed plans for an initial public offering as of September 2026.

Sources

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

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