Startup Deep Dive : TalentSprint — bought twice in five years, still posting a loss on Rs 100 crore revenue

TalentSprint has changed owners twice in under five years — sold to the National Stock Exchange’s education arm in November 2020, then sold on to Accenture in April 2025 — and on neither occasion did the buyer disclose what it paid. What is on the record is the business underneath both deals: a Hyderabad deep-tech training company whose revenue rose 40.8% to ₹100 crore (~$10.4 million) in FY23 from ₹71 crore in FY22, according to its regulatory filings as reported by Entrackr, even as the company posted a net loss that same year.

That is the contradiction worth chasing: a company two very different institutional buyers each wanted enough to acquire outright, yet one whose own numbers show that revenue growth has not yet turned into profit. What TalentSprint actually sells, why a stock exchange bought a training company and then let it go to a global consulting firm five years later, and what its FY23 loss and its royalty payments to its own parent reveal about the economics of India’s institution-branded ed-tech model, is what the rest of this piece traces out.

Quick facts

What they do

TalentSprint sells short, structured, high-intensity training rather than degrees: coding and deep-tech bootcamps, certificate programmes and executive courses in artificial intelligence, data science, cybersecurity, chip design and semiconductors, digital transformation, sustainability and leadership, built and delivered jointly with academic institutions including IIT Madras, IIT Delhi, IIT Hyderabad, IIT Kanpur, IISc Bangalore, IIM Calcutta, IIM Lucknow, IIM Jammu, IIM Mumbai and IIIT Hyderabad, plus enterprise technology partners such as Google and Pegasystems (per TalentSprint’s own “About Us” page and the April 2025 Accenture acquisition announcement). Its customers fall into three groups: fresh engineering graduates who need to become job-ready, working professionals looking to pivot into deep-tech roles, and enterprises and governments buying reskilling programmes at workforce scale — the last of which is now the explicit strategic rationale for its owner, Accenture, which folded TalentSprint into Accenture LearnVantage, its dedicated corporate and government upskilling business.

The origin

Santanu Paul was not a typical Hyderabad founder. An IIT Madras computer science graduate, he earned a PhD in computer science and engineering from the University of Michigan in 1995, then worked as a research scientist at IBM’s T J Watson Research Center in New York before co-founding a Boston-area B2B technology company, Viveca Inc, which was acquired by OpenPages in 2000; he stayed on as its CTO until early 2003 (per his account to Global Indian, December 2023). He then moved to Hyderabad to run Virtusa Corporation’s global delivery operations, building Virtusa India past 4,000 employees by the time the parent listed on Nasdaq in 2007. It was that corporate vantage point that exposed the gap he later built a company around: despite thousands of engineering graduates pouring out of Indian colleges every year, industry could barely hire them, with interview-to-hire conversion rates as low as 2-3% by his own telling. Paul connected with J A Chowdary, then heading Nvidia’s India operations, and Madhumurty Ronanki, a former Virtusa colleague, through Hyderabad’s TiE entrepreneur network; the three shared a conviction that young Indians needed a faster route to global-standard technical skills than the formal education system offered. They founded TalentSprint at the end of 2009, put in roughly ₹1 crore of their own savings and money borrowed from friends and family, and started out running physical coding bootcamps alongside, per the company’s own published timeline, courses to prepare candidates for bank entrance exams.

The struggle years

The first real strain was structural: TalentSprint ran on physical, instructor-led training centres for the better part of a decade, and that offline model simply did not scale. “The challenge was that the offline model was not scalable, and that made us build a tech platform,” Santanu Paul told YourStory in September 2020 — a rebuild that only reached its current digital-and-hybrid form in 2018, nine years after the company was founded, once it became clear that continuing to add physical centres could not keep pace with demand. Somewhere in that stretch, the founding team itself thinned out: by 2020, Paul was telling YourStory that his two co-founders, J A Chowdary and Madhumurty Ronanki, were “no more with the company,” leaving him as the sole founder still running the business he had started, with a headcount of just over 100 people at that point. Then, within two years of finally getting its digital platform live, the company had to tear up its own delivery model a second time: the COVID-19 pandemic forced TalentSprint to abandon the hybrid online/offline mix it had just built and move to a fully online model almost overnight in 2020, while simultaneously trying to stand up a new platform-as-a-service line it had not planned to prioritise so soon (YourStory, September 2020).

The turning point

The event that changed TalentSprint’s trajectory was not a product launch but an ownership change. On 17 November 2020, NSE Academy Ltd — a wholly owned subsidiary of the National Stock Exchange of India — announced it had acquired a majority stake in TalentSprint; the financial terms were not disclosed (NSE India press release and Business Standard, both 17 November 2020). Vikram Limaye, then NSE’s MD and CEO, framed the deal around scale that TalentSprint alone could not reach, citing “six million working professionals in India today in need of deep-tech knowledge interventions, and another ten million college students” entering the workforce without future-proof skills. The numbers on either side of that date tell the story of what changed: in FY20, the year before the acquisition closed, TalentSprint’s own founder put its revenue at ₹50 crore, with the company still chasing a self-set target of ₹100 crore (YourStory, September 2020); three fiscal years after coming under NSE Academy’s ownership, revenue had climbed to ₹100 crore in FY23, up from ₹71 crore in FY22 — a 40.8% jump in a single year (Entrackr, June 2023). Being owned by an exchange operator did not just add a credibility stamp; it added a bill: royalty payments to NSE Academy alone came to ₹25.4 crore in FY22, representing roughly a quarter of TalentSprint’s income that year, per Entrackr’s reading of its financial filings.

The money behind it

TalentSprint’s funding history is unusually short for a company that ultimately changed hands twice — it raised one disclosed institutional round in fifteen years, and grew mostly on acquisition, not venture capital:

• 2009: founders self-funded the company with about ₹1 crore from personal savings and friends and family (YourStory, September 2020)
• 2011: the National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC), a Government of India-backed skilling body, came in as an early shareholder, backing the bootcamp model while it was still unproven (NSE India press release, November 2020; TalentSprint’s own company timeline)
• 2012: a ₹20 crore Series A round led by Nexus Venture Partners — TalentSprint’s only publicly disclosed equity financing round — funded the shift from a bootstrapped training centre into an institutionally backed company (YourStory, September 2020; NSE India press release, November 2020)
• 17 November 2020: NSE Academy Ltd acquired majority control of TalentSprint from its existing shareholders, including Nexus Venture Partners and NSDC; deal value not disclosed (NSE India, Business Standard)
• 23 April 2025: Accenture (NYSE: ACN) acquired TalentSprint outright from NSE Academy Ltd; deal value again not disclosed, and about 210 TalentSprint employees transferred to Accenture LearnVantage (Accenture Newsroom; Entrackr, both 23 April 2025)

No independent valuation of TalentSprint has ever been made public. Both changes of control were announced as strategic transactions rather than priced funding rounds, and Ashishkumar Chauhan, NSE’s Managing Director and CEO, described the 2025 sale to Accenture as part of “NSE’s strategic focus on its core business while divesting from non-core business areas” — language that frames TalentSprint, for its second parent in a row, as a peripheral asset rather than a core bet.

How it makes money

TalentSprint’s revenue has historically come from three streams, as the company described them to YourStory in September 2020:

• direct learner fees for flagship bootcamps and certificate programmes, historically priced in the ₹40,000-₹50,000 range per learner
• institutional and corporate partnerships, where an academic institution or a company pays TalentSprint to build and run a branded programme, with TalentSprint acting as the delivery platform
• a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) line built out during the pandemic, licensing TalentSprint’s iPearl.ai learning platform to colleges and universities moving their own programmes online

The part outsiders most often get wrong is treating this as high-margin licensing income the way a pure software platform would earn it. TalentSprint’s own FY22-FY23 cost lines show otherwise: advertisement and business-promotion spend was ₹27.6 crore in FY22 and grew 47.5% the following year, employee benefit costs rose 42.9% to keep pace with revenue growth, and royalty paid to its then-parent, NSE Academy, added another ₹25.4 crore in FY22 alone (Entrackr, June 2023). Between customer-acquisition marketing, delivery headcount and a related-party royalty line, the margin TalentSprint actually keeps sits well below what its “elite academic partner” branding might suggest — FY23 EBITDA margin came in at just 3.68%, even as revenue crossed the symbolic ₹100 crore mark.

The numbers

TalentSprint’s disclosed financials, drawn from its regulatory filings as reported by YourStory and Entrackr, plus a more recent estimate from startup-data platform Tracxn, show revenue climbing steadily even as profitability stayed elusive in the one year a loss figure was published:

TalentSprint’s FY24 financials had not surfaced in public filings trackers as of this piece, and its FY25 figure comes from Tracxn’s database rather than a press-reported filing, so it is presented here as an estimate rather than an audited number. What is verifiable across the years that are documented is the direction: revenue roughly doubled between FY20 and FY23, and total expenditure grew even faster than revenue in FY23 — up 41.9% against a 40.8% revenue increase — which is why a year of strong top-line growth still produced a net loss rather than a profit (Entrackr, June 2023).

Where the money comes from

TalentSprint has never published a revenue split by geography or business line, so the closest verifiable picture of its mix comes from how the company itself organises its current programme catalogue and footprint:

• Programme areas: AI and data science, leadership and management, future-tech, digital transformation, sustainability, and silicon and hardware (chip design/semiconductors) — the six categories TalentSprint’s own site uses to organise its course catalogue as of September 2026
• Geography: headquartered in Gachibowli, Hyderabad, with US operations added in 2021 through an office in Sunnyvale, California, registered as TalentSprint Inc (TalentSprint’s own company timeline)
• Distribution: delivery in partnership with more than half a dozen IITs and IIMs, IISc Bangalore, IIIT Hyderabad, Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science and the University of Cambridge, alongside corporate partners Google and Pegasystems

The surprise is what the disclosed cost lines say about how much that elite-institution network is actually worth on its own. Despite a roster of partners most ed-tech companies would kill for, TalentSprint’s advertisement and business-promotion spend — ₹27.6 crore in FY22, growing to roughly ₹40.7 crore in FY23 — was one of its largest cost lines, and grew faster than almost every other expense category that year (Entrackr, June 2023). Academic branding evidently draws attention; it does not, on this evidence, replace the need to pay for customer acquisition.

The risks

• Related-party royalty dependency: in FY22, royalty payments to its then-parent NSE Academy came to ₹25.4 crore, roughly a quarter of that year’s income (Entrackr, June 2023) — a cost line set by an ownership relationship rather than open market competition, and one that resets, rather than disappears, each time TalentSprint changes parents.
• Thin profitability despite scale: FY23 EBITDA margin was just 3.68%, and the company posted a net loss of ₹3.9 crore in the same year that revenue crossed ₹100 crore for the first time (Entrackr, June 2023) — evidence that revenue growth has not yet produced the operating leverage a scaling training business is expected to show.
• Being treated as a non-core asset: TalentSprint has changed controlling owners twice in under five years — NSE Academy in November 2020, Accenture in April 2025 — and NSE’s own CEO, Ashishkumar Chauhan, publicly described the second sale as “divesting from non-core business areas” (Accenture Newsroom, 23 April 2025). A business two consecutive parents have treated as peripheral is exposed to its next owner’s strategic priorities, not only to its own market performance.

The takeaway

TalentSprint’s history argues against reading an acquisition as proof that a business has “made it.” Being bought twice in five years, by an exchange operator and then by a global consulting firm, says more about the value of TalentSprint’s distribution — its academic partnerships, its enterprise relationships, its position inside India’s deep-tech training niche — to a much larger institution than it says about the strength of TalentSprint’s own standalone economics, which by its own FY23 filing were still running a loss on ₹100 crore of revenue. The transferable lesson sits in that gap: when a company’s core asset is access and relationships rather than product margin, its most likely long-term home is inside a larger organisation that can monetise that access at a scale the original company never could on its own — which is precisely the trade both NSE Academy and, later, Accenture made.

Frequently asked questions

What does TalentSprint do?

TalentSprint builds and delivers deep-tech bootcamps, certificate programmes and executive courses in areas such as AI, data science, cybersecurity, chip design and leadership, in partnership with academic institutions including IITs, IIMs and IISc Bangalore, and corporate partners such as Google and Pegasystems.

Who owns TalentSprint now?

Accenture (NYSE: ACN) acquired TalentSprint on 23 April 2025 from NSE Academy Ltd, a wholly owned subsidiary of the National Stock Exchange of India, and folded it into Accenture LearnVantage, its corporate and government upskilling business (Accenture Newsroom, 23 April 2025).

Who founded TalentSprint and when?

Santanu Paul, J A Chowdary and Madhumurty Ronanki founded TalentSprint at the end of 2009 in Hyderabad. By 2020, Santanu Paul was the only founder still with the company; he has since been succeeded as head of TalentSprint by Anurag Bansal, who joined the company in 2021 and now holds the title of President under Accenture’s ownership.

Is TalentSprint profitable?

Not as of its last disclosed year. TalentSprint posted a net loss of ₹3.9 crore in FY23 even as revenue rose 40.8% to ₹100 crore, with an EBITDA margin of just 3.68% (Entrackr, June 2023). Its FY24 and FY25 profit or loss figures were not public as of this piece.

What did NSE and Accenture pay for TalentSprint?

Neither deal’s financial terms were disclosed. NSE Academy’s November 2020 acquisition of majority control and Accenture’s April 2025 acquisition from NSE Academy were both announced without a purchase price (NSE India press release, November 2020; Accenture Newsroom, April 2025).

Sources

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

• NSE India, “NSE Academy acquires majority stake in deep tech education firm TalentSprint,” press release, 17 November 2020
• Business Standard (Press Trust of India), “NSE Academy buys majority stake in deep tech education firm TalentSprint,” 17 November 2020
• YourStory, “This startup offers deep tech courses from institutes like IITs; is eying Rs 100 Cr turnover in FY21,” Rashi Varshney, 24 September 2020
• Entrackr, “NSE Academy-owned TalentSprint posts Rs 100 Cr revenue in FY23,” June 2023
• Entrackr, “Accenture acquires TalentSprint from NSE Academy,” 23 April 2025
• Accenture Newsroom, “Accenture Acquires TalentSprint to Expand LearnVantage’s Capabilities in Developing Future-Ready Talent for Enterprises and Governments,” 23 April 2025
• Global Indian, “Dr. Santanu Paul: Transforming deep tech education in India with TalentSprint,” Bindu Gopal Rao, 2 December 2023
• Wikipedia, “TalentSprint” (accessed September 2026)
• TalentSprint, “About Us” company timeline and leadership pages, talentsprint.com (accessed September 2026)
• Nexus Venture Partners, “Nexus backed TalentSprint announces acquisition of majority stake by NSE Academy” (accessed September 2026)
• Tracxn, “TALENTSPRINT PRIVATE LIMITED — Company Profile & Financials” (data as of December 2025)
• EMIS, “Talentsprint Private Limited — Company Profile” (data as of July 2026)

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