Startup Deep Dive : Tinkerly — the Jaipur STEM-kit startup whose backer marked its Rs 5.25 crore stake to nil

In September 2021, Navneet Education, one of India’s largest school-book publishers, paid ₹5.25 crore (about $0.55 million at $1 ≈ ₹96.0) for roughly 14.7 percent of a Jaipur STEM-kit startup called Tinkerly. By 31 March 2025, Navneet’s auditors were carrying that stake at nil. In between, the company that claimed a presence in 6,000-plus schools saw its revenue fall from ₹5.8 crore in FY24 to ₹27.8 lakh in FY25, a drop of 95.2 percent in a single year, as per RoC-derived figures compiled by Inc42.

Tinkerly is not a famous failure. It never raised a large round, never hired a celebrity brand ambassador, and never made a shutdown announcement. That is exactly why it is worth reading. It is the median Indian edtech story: a real product, real schools, real revenue in the single-digit crores, a listed strategic investor who liked the pitch, and then a slow slide that is visible only in a subsidiary’s notes to accounts. This deep dive reconstructs that slide from the filings, and asks what a founder who did most things sensibly can still get wrong.

Quick facts

What Tinkerly does

Tinkerly sells hands-on STEM education to two customers. To schools, it sets up tinkering or innovation labs stocked with its own kits and a year-long curriculum, and it is a registered vendor on the government e-marketplace for NITI Aayog’s Atal Tinkering Labs, as per an October 2023 Jobifynn profile. To parents, it sells online coding classes for children aged roughly 6 to 16, bundled with physical kits and delivered through its Let’s Tinker app, which had crossed 50,000 Play Store downloads by 2023 per the same profile. Navneet’s FY24 annual report describes the investee in one line: STEM-based learning kits for children, coupled with online coding classes, with a B2C coding segment and B2B school customers.

The origin: four alumni and a portable science lab

Three of the four founders came out of IIT Delhi. Sharad Bansal studied textile technology with a minor in business management; OP Godara did a BTech; Kapil Arya did a BTech and MTech in chemical engineering. The fourth, Vivek Pathak, held an MBA from XLRI Jamshedpur and had spent eight and a half years in strategy and software development, according to profiles in Digital Yug and Viestories from May 2022. The company they incorporated on 2 July 2015 was named Elation Edtech Private Limited, but it went to market as Srjna.

Srjna’s insight was modest and physical. Indian schools taught science from textbooks, and the founders believed a portable model that a teacher could carry into a Class 7 classroom would change how a concept landed. Inc42’s September 2020 profile, the most detailed account of the early years, describes Srjna as a B2B venture that partnered with schools to establish STEM innovation laboratories. The founders discovered, while setting those labs up, that the hardware they wanted to teach with did not exist at a price an Indian school would pay. So they built it: an IoT learning kit, an AI kit for which the company filed a patent, and a basic science exposure kit, developed by a team that mixed electrical and mechanical engineers with product designers and educators.

The arithmetic of the school business was clear from early on. A full lab cost a school ₹5 lakh to ₹7 lakh, with stripped-down programmes from about ₹50,000, as per Inc42. By September 2020 the company had signed 250 schools over five years, 60 percent of them in tier 2 and tier 3 cities. That focus on smaller towns was deliberate: Bansal told Inc42 the target was the 64 million middle-class households earning ₹5 lakh to ₹15 lakh a year, families who would never pay metro-edtech prices. The company positioned its kits as school-linked learning tools rather than toys, and Bansal’s argument was that linking a kit to a learning outcome stretched a child’s engagement from days to about three months.

The struggle years

The first crisis is dated precisely. Tinkerly closed FY20, the year to March 2020, with revenue of ₹5.5 crore, as Bansal told Inc42. Then schools shut. By September 2020 the company’s monthly revenue was ₹5 lakh to ₹6 lakh, which annualises to barely ₹0.7 crore, an eighty-odd percent collapse in the run rate. The team was 18 people. The B2B model that had taken five years to build had no customers who could open their doors.

The response was a forced pivot to consumers, pulled forward from whatever the original plan had been. Tinkerly relaunched its free Let’s Tinker app with 200-plus projects, and its user base went from 8,000 in March 2020 to 35,000 in August 2020, per Inc42. In the summer of 2020 it launched paid grade-wise courses: a Learner package at ₹6,000 with eight recorded lessons and three live one-to-one sessions, and an Achiever package at ₹16,000 with 24 recorded lessons, nine live sessions and a kit. Six weeks in, it had about 1,000 paying subscribers and was converting roughly 6 percent of the users it notified. Bansal’s stated goal at the time was ₹1 crore a month within ten months. The company would not get there.

The second struggle was structural, and it surfaced once schools reopened. In a May 2022 interview with Viestories, the company said its customer acquisition cost in premium segments had tripled after the reopening. The pandemic-era parent who was happy to buy a coding class online had gone back to offline tuition, and Tinkerly was now competing for the same attention as Avishkaar, SP Robotics and Wiingy directly, and against far better funded coding-for-kids brands indirectly. Its answer was price: classes from ₹500 a month, as per an October 2021 TechStory interview, and what it described as the first coding courses in Hindi. The company said it was reaching 150,000-plus students across India, the Middle East and North America.

The third struggle was capital. In that same May 2022 interview Tinkerly said it was at $600,000 in annual recurring revenue, growing direct-to-consumer sales at 80 percent month on month over the prior six months, targeting $1 million ARR by December 2022, and seeking $5 million to $7 million for expansion. Every tracker we could open, Inc42, CB Insights and Tracxn, records the September 2021 round as the last money in. The $5 million to $7 million never arrived.

The turning point: the Navneet cheque

The single event that defines Tinkerly’s arc is the round announced on 15 September 2021. The company raised ₹6.5 crore, led by Navneet Tech Ventures, a wholly owned subsidiary of Navneet Education, with participation from SucSEED Angel Network, Keiretsu Forum, Marwari Catalysts and three individuals: Divyashish Jindal of Doubtnut, Chand Das, formerly of ITC Education, and Saurabh Aggarwal of Fitso. Skwerup Capital Partners advised. Total funding crossed ₹10 crore. YourStory, Entrepreneur India and ETV Bharat all carried the same numbers.

The numbers on the way in were the best the company would ever publish. Monthly revenue had grown eightfold in the three months since the new Let’s Tinker platform launched in April 2021. The company claimed 50,000-plus online learners, 300,000-plus hours of learning consumed, a reach into 6,000-plus schools and 100-plus learning centres, and said 60 percent of its users came organically at near-zero acquisition cost. Navneet’s own filings tell us what that pitch was worth: its subsidiary bought 1,104 shares from existing shareholders and 718 new shares for a total of ₹5.25 crore, at ₹28,815.78 a share, for 14.70 percent of the company, as per the FY22 annual report. Divide one by the other and the round priced Tinkerly at roughly ₹36 crore post-money. That is our arithmetic on Navneet’s audited note, not a company-stated figure.

The numbers on the way out are in the same set of books. At 31 March 2022 and again at 31 March 2023, Navneet’s management judged that no impairment was needed and that cost equalled fair value given the initial stage of the investment. At 31 March 2024, after a valuation report from a registered valuer and a review of actual performance against budget, Navneet recognised a fair-value loss of ₹4,19,32,750, about 80 percent of the cost, per the FY24 annual reports of both Navneet Education and its subsidiary Navneet Futuretech. At 31 March 2025 it took a further ₹1,05,69,600, this time on management estimates rather than an external valuer, and a related-party note in Navneet Futuretech’s FY25 accounts states the position in one sentence: the investment in Elation Edtech “stands Nil due to impairment”. Three and a half years after leading the round, the strategic investor’s carrying value was zero.

The money behind it

Tinkerly’s funding history is short, angel-heavy and entirely pre-2022.

• Early seed: backing from Rajasthan Angel Innovators Network (RAIN), SucSEED Venture Partners, Gray Matters Capital and Keiretsu Forum, as listed by Inc42 in September 2020. The company’s own statement that the 2021 round took total funding to ₹10 crore implies about ₹3.5 crore had been raised before it (our arithmetic on company-stated totals).
• September 2021: ₹6.5 crore led by Navneet Tech Ventures, with SucSEED Angel Network, Keiretsu Forum, Marwari Catalysts, Divyashish Jindal, Chand Das and Saurabh Aggarwal; advised by Skwerup Capital Partners (YourStory, Entrepreneur India, ETV Bharat, September 2021). Inc42’s tracker sizes the round at $884,590 and dates the last round to August to October 2021; CB Insights puts total disclosed funding at $880,000. These are dollar conversions of the same rupee round, not additional money.
• Navneet’s stake: ₹5.25 crore for 14.70 percent at entry (Navneet FY22 annual report), transferred at cost in FY23 from Navneet Tech Ventures to fellow subsidiary Navneet Futuretech, which has since reported holding 14.67 percent (Navneet FY23, FY24 and FY25 annual reports). Navneet’s director Ketan Gala sits on Elation Edtech’s board, per Tofler’s RoC data.
• What Navneet changed: it gave Tinkerly a listed-company backer whose then Futuretech CEO, Devish Gala, told EducationWorld in August 2022 that the ₹5.25 crore investment was made because Tinkerly “partners with schools to transform their classrooms into STEM labs”. It also put Tinkerly in a portfolio alongside much bigger bets: ₹118 crore in K12 Techno Services, ₹75 crore in Sports For All and ₹16.5 crore in BeGalileo, out of ₹200 crore-plus deployed, per the same interview.
• Latest valuation: none published since 2021. The only marks that exist are Navneet’s, and they went ₹5.25 crore, ₹5.25 crore, ₹1.06 crore, nil at successive March year-ends from 2022 to 2025.

How Tinkerly makes money

The model is a hybrid that Navneet’s FY24 report summarises as three products, coding curriculum, STEM kits and STEM labs, sold to two customer types, schools and families.

• School labs (B2B): a one-time sale of a tinkering or innovation lab at ₹5 lakh to ₹7 lakh, with entry programmes from ₹50,000, plus curriculum and teacher training (Inc42, September 2020). Government demand flows through the Atal Tinkering Labs scheme, for which Tinkerly is a GeM-registered vendor (Jobifynn, October 2023). Money in is lumpy and tied to school budgets; costs out are hardware, installation and travel to tier 2 and tier 3 towns.
• Consumer courses (B2C): grade-wise packages that ranged from ₹6,000 (Learner) to ₹16,000 (Achiever, including a kit) at launch in 2020, later repositioned from ₹500 a month with Explorer, Learner and Achiever tiers of two weeks, one month and six months (TechStory, October 2021). Costs out are live teachers and marketing; the company claimed 60 percent organic acquisition in 2021, then said premium-segment CAC tripled after schools reopened (Viestories, May 2022).
• Kits: proprietary hardware, including the Robotics IoT, Watertronics and Troot AI kits and science DIY kits, sold inside both channels (TechStory, October 2021). This is where the margin should sit, because the kit is the part competitors cannot copy from a Zoom recording.
• The app: Let’s Tinker is free at the top of the funnel, with a Zoom integration for paid live classes; the company reported about 6 percent conversion from notified users in 2020 (Inc42).

The part people get wrong is to read Tinkerly as a coding-classes company that happened to sell kits. Its FY20 revenue of ₹5.5 crore was earned almost entirely from school labs before any paid online course existed. The consumer business was a pandemic response layered on top of a hardware-and-installation business, and the economics of the two never reconciled: the B2B side was lumpy but cash-generating, the B2C side needed the marketing money Tinkerly failed to raise in 2022.

The numbers

Elation Edtech is a small private company and did not publish its accounts. Two series exist in the public record: revenue and loss figures derived from its RoC filings by Inc42 and Tofler, and the audited carrying value of Navneet’s stake. Together they draw the same line.

Navneet’s audited marks on its 1,822 shares, in ₹ crore: 5.25 at 31 March 2022; 5.25 at 31 March 2023; 1.06 at 31 March 2024 after a ₹4.19 crore fair-value loss; nil at 31 March 2025 after a further ₹1.06 crore loss (Navneet Education annual reports FY22 to FY25; Navneet Futuretech financial statements FY24 and FY25).

• The FY25 cost base did not shrink with revenue. Expenses of ₹4.1 crore against ₹27.8 lakh of revenue means the company spent about ₹15 for every ₹1 it earned, per Inc42’s figures.
• Tofler’s 114.15 percent fall in net worth for FY25 implies the company’s equity turned negative during the year; the rupee figure is behind a paywall and we have not stated it.
• Paid-up capital is ₹1,26,900 against authorised capital of ₹6.12 crore, as per Tofler and Instafinancials, consistent with a company that raised its money at a high premium per share rather than by issuing many shares.

Where the money comes from

No audited segment split has ever been published. What can be reconstructed from company statements and Navneet’s description:

• By channel: Navneet’s FY24 report labels the segments as B2C coding and B2B schools. In FY20, before paid online courses existed, essentially all of the ₹5.5 crore came from school labs and kits (Inc42, September 2020). By May 2022 the company was describing D2C as its growth engine at 80 percent month-on-month, on an ARR base of $600,000 (Viestories).
• By geography: 60 percent of partner schools were in tier 2 and tier 3 cities as of September 2020 (Inc42). Students were claimed across India, the Middle East and North America (TechStory, October 2021; Digital Yug, May 2022), but no revenue share outside India was ever given.
• By reach claims over time: 250 schools (September 2020, Inc42), 6,000-plus schools reached (September 2021, YourStory), 700-plus partner schools (May 2022, Viestories), 2,000-plus schools and 500,000 students (Internshala profile, undated). The gap between the 250 and 700 partner-school figures and the 6,000 reached figure is the gap between a paying customer and a distribution touchpoint.
• The surprise: the company that told investors 60 percent of its users arrived at near-zero acquisition cost was, three years later, spending ₹4.1 crore to book ₹27.8 lakh. Either the organic funnel stopped converting once the pandemic ended, or the B2B school pipeline that generated the FY24 ₹5.8 crore dried up in FY25, or both. The filings do not say which; the scale of the fall suggests the school business, not just the app, went quiet.

The risks

• Going-concern risk is the headline. FY25 revenue of ₹27.8 lakh, a loss of ₹3.8 crore, total assets of ₹1.6 crore and a net worth that Tofler’s metrics show turned negative (Inc42; Tofler). No new equity has been recorded since 2021, and the one institutional shareholder has written its stake to zero and switched from an external valuer to management estimates, which is what an investor does when it no longer expects to pay for a valuation report. Tinkerly’s website, tinker.ly, did not respond over HTTP or HTTPS when we tried it on 26 September 2026, and its coding subdomain served an untrusted certificate. Inc42’s profile shows 20 employees and 534 monthly web visitors.
• Founder attention has moved. Sharad Bansal, Tinkerly’s CEO and public face, is founder and managing partner of Warmup Ventures, a Jaipur VC firm set up as a syndicate in 2023 that announced a ₹300 crore Fund II in December 2024 to write ₹5 crore to ₹7 crore cheques into 25 to 30 startups, with 15-plus investments already made (Entrepreneur India, December 2024). Bansal remains a whole-time director of Elation Edtech at RoC (Tofler). Running a fund and a distressed startup at once is a stretch few founders manage. RoC records also show two new additional directors, Abhishek Singh on 23 March 2026 and Manish Kumar Singh on 4 April 2026 (Falconebiz); the filings do not say why, and we do not speculate.
• The market moved against both halves of the model. On the consumer side, demand for online coding classes for children fell after schools reopened; Tinkerly itself reported tripled CAC in 2022. On the school side, tinkering-lab sales depend on school capital budgets and government procurement cycles for Atal Tinkering Labs through GeM, which favour scale vendors and price competition. A company that could not raise the $5 million to $7 million it sought in 2022 had no cushion for either.

The takeaway

Take strategic money and you inherit a strategic investor’s accounting. Tinkerly never announced bad news; Navneet’s auditors did it for them, in Note 10.4(c) of one annual report and Note 9.4(b) of the next. A listed backer marks you every March, publishes the mark, and names the method. For a founder that is a discipline worth wanting, because it forces the honest conversation a year earlier than a friendly angel would. But it is also a public ledger of decline that a private company cannot control, and it starts on the day the cheque clears.

The deeper lesson is about the difference between reach and revenue. Tinkerly could truthfully say 6,000 schools and 150,000 students in 2021 while filing ₹5.8 crore of revenue in FY24, because reach counted every classroom that had ever seen a kit and revenue counted the few hundred that paid for a lab. When the pandemic erased the paying schools, the reach number did not fall; it simply stopped meaning anything. Founders who measure the thing that invoices, not the thing that impresses, notice the slide while there is still time to raise.

Frequently asked questions

Who owns Tinkerly?

Tinkerly is the brand of Elation Edtech Private Limited, Jaipur. Its four founders, Sharad Bansal, Vivekanand Priyadarshi (Vivek Pathak), Om Prakash (OP Godara) and Kapil Arya, are whole-time directors and shareholders per Tofler’s RoC data. Navneet Futuretech Limited, a subsidiary of listed Navneet Education, holds 14.67 percent, as per Navneet’s FY23 to FY25 annual reports. Angel networks including SucSEED, Keiretsu Forum, Rajasthan Angels and Marwari Catalysts hold the rest.

How much money has Tinkerly raised?

About ₹10 crore in total, per the company’s September 2021 statement, of which ₹6.5 crore came in the round led by Navneet Tech Ventures that month. Navneet’s own filings show its subsidiary paid ₹5.25 crore for 14.70 percent at entry. No funding has been recorded since 2021 by Inc42, CB Insights or Tracxn.

What is Tinkerly’s revenue?

₹27.8 lakh in FY25, down 95.2 percent from ₹5.8 crore in FY24, according to RoC-derived figures on Inc42. The company had told Inc42 its FY20 revenue was ₹5.5 crore, so FY24 was roughly flat on the pre-Covid year before the FY25 collapse. FY25 expenses were ₹4.1 crore and the loss was ₹3.8 crore.

Why did Navneet write off its Tinkerly investment?

Navneet’s annual reports say the impairment tests considered business outlook, actual performance against budget and a registered valuer’s fair-value report. It recognised a fair-value loss of ₹4.19 crore in FY24 and a further ₹1.06 crore in FY25, taking the carrying value to nil at 31 March 2025. Navneet has not commented publicly beyond the notes to accounts.

Is Tinkerly still operating?

Elation Edtech is an active company at RoC, filed its FY25 balance sheet and held its AGM on 30 September 2025, and appointed two additional directors in March and April 2026, per Falconebiz. Inc42 lists 20 employees. Its website did not load when we checked on 26 September 2026. We found no public announcement of a shutdown, sale or restructuring, and none of the sources we opened state what the company is doing today.

Sources

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

• Navneet Education Limited, Annual Report 2021-22, notes 10.4 and 10.5 to consolidated financial statements (investment of ₹525 lakh for 14.70 percent; 1,822 shares at ₹28,815.78), July 2022
• Navneet Education Limited, Annual Report 2022-23, note 10.4 (transfer to Navneet Futuretech; 14.67 percent; cost equals fair value), July 2023
• Navneet Education Limited, Annual Report 2023-24, Tinkerly portfolio page and note 10.4(c) (fair-value loss of ₹419 lakh), July 2024
• Navneet Education Limited, Annual Report 2024-25, note 9.4(b) (fair-value loss of ₹106 lakh; management estimates), July 2025
• Navneet Futuretech Limited, financial statements for the year ended 31 March 2024, notes 6.4(d) and 6.5(b), June 2024
• Navneet Futuretech Limited, financial statements for the year ended 31 March 2025, notes 4.3(c) and 4.4(b) and related-party note (“stands Nil due to impairment”), September 2025
• Inc42, “Tinkerly Looks To Infuse STEM Courses With Practical AI, IoT & Robotics Kits”, September 2020
• Inc42, Tinkerly company profile and financials pages (FY24 revenue ₹5.8 crore; FY25 revenue ₹27.8 lakh, expenses ₹4.1 crore, loss ₹3.8 crore, assets ₹1.6 crore; employees; funding), accessed September 2026
• YourStory, “Edtech startup Tinkerly raises Rs 6.5 Cr led by Navneet Education”, September 2021
• Entrepreneur India, “Edtech Startup Tinkerly Raises INR 6.5 Cr Led By Navneet Education And Others”, September 2021
• ETV Bharat, “Edtech startup Tinkerly raises Rs10 cr from Navneet Education, others”, September 2021
• Venture Intelligence, “Edtech startup Tinkerly raises Rs.6.5 Cr from Navneet Tech Ventures, others”, September 2021
• TechStory, “In Conversation with Sharad Bansal, Co Founder of Tinkerly”, October 2021
• Digital Yug, “Tinkerly Startup Story”, May 2022
• Viestories, “Tinkerly – An Edtech Startup based on STEM Learning”, May 2022
• EducationWorld, “Interview: Devish Gala, CEO, Navneet FutureTech Partnerships”, August 2022
• Jobifynn, “Tinkerly: How this Ed-tech startup is helping parents and kids learn beyond coding in 2023”, October 2023
• Insiders Talk, “Sharad Bansal, Co-Founder of Tinkerly” (podcast page), December 2023
• Entrepreneur India, “Warmup Ventures Launches INR 300 Cr Fund II”, December 2024
• Tofler, Elation Edtech Private Limited company and financials pages (CIN, capital, directors, FY25 percentage changes), accessed September 2026
• Instafinancials, Elation Edtech Private Limited (incorporation, capital, last AGM), accessed September 2026
• Falconebiz, Elation Edtech Private Limited (FY25 metrics, 2026 director appointments, last AGM 30 September 2025), accessed September 2026
• CB Insights, Tinkerly (formerly Srjna) profile, accessed September 2026
• Internshala, Elation Edtech Private Limited (Tinkerly) employer profile, accessed September 2026
• The Invincible India, connection test to tinker.ly, www.tinker.ly and code.tinker.ly, 26 September 2026

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