During this journey, the company faced many difficult, make or break choices:

– Remain in Mumbai or move the entire team to Bangalore
– Invest in data science and AI, when most people didn’t know what AI stood for, or plough funds back into sales and marketing
– Keep charging for the product or give everyone free access to the learning platform

And, all of this, while never having more than six months of cash in the bank!

Little did I know, from the day I met Aditi, founder & CEO of Embibe, at a Starbucks four years ago, that this partnership would be a series of high stake trade-offs, with no guaranteed outcomes.

The move to Bangalore was a big deal. Aditi recognized the need to invest more in the technology stack but couldn’t find enough of the right talent in Mumbai. At the same time, we didn’t have enough cash to move to Bangalore and then start the search for talent. She took a calculated risk, pre-hiring a couple of leading engineers who assured us a larger talent pool, before we moved.

Within a year, Embibe managed to attract leading data scientists to crack some of the most difficult problems in education – the interconnection and relationship between thousands of concepts learnt from grade one to twelve. This breakthrough led to the creation of the Knowledge Tree, which helps students better understand the roots of each concept and its application. This has, in turn, fueled greater student engagement on the platform.

As engagement grew, another major fork in the road was pricing – should we stop charging and instead, give the product away for free. We spent countless hours debating this move as it would result in revenues plummeting to zero. This bold move, however, not only allowed us to give millions of students access to the platform, but also enabled us to collect data at a scale we never imagined.

With a world-class data science team in place, and billions of actions being captured, the team pioneered a game changing learning platform that helped students improve outcomes by 55%.   Yes, 55% score improvement across some of the country’s toughest exams.

Each phase, each decision, each move has allowed me to believe more in Aditi and Embibe’s audacious mission – to change how people learn.  

I am super excited to be part of the journey ahead and to see the impact Embibe has on millions of students.