Numbers, not adjectives
The four fields, in my own words
- Company
- Masai School — founded June 2019 in Bengaluru with Nrupul Dev and Yogesh Bhat. EBITDA-positive since January 2025. We grow on our own profit now.
- Elevator pitch
- I train people from anywhere in India to an industry-ready standard, and I get paid when they get paid. Skills first, degree irrelevant.
- Stage
- Seven years in. Survived the bootcamp winter, rebuilt the model, turned profitable. Now compounding toward AI-native training at national scale.
- Domain
How I got here — including the hard part
- 2008IIT Kanpur
B.Tech, 2008–2012. A Teach For India stint in my pre-final year showed me the gap I'd spend my thirties closing.
- 2013Co-founded Grabhouse
CEO of the brokerage-free rentals startup. Raised ~$13M from Sequoia, Kalaari and India Quotient.
- 2016Acquired by Quikr
Exited in November 2016 and stayed on as a business head. I know layoffs, funding stress and M&A from the inside — not from a podcast.
- 2019Started Masai School
A trip to Kenya — and the Maasai way of training every member of the tribe — became the model and the name. 11am to 11pm, six days a week.
- 2022The model nearly broke
The funding winter froze hiring, and pure pay-after-placement stopped working. I didn't defend it — I rebuilt it: IIT/IIM prepaid programs, employer-paid AI upskilling, an AI job-matching platform.
- 2025Profitable
Losses cut 69% year on year. EBITDA-positive from January 2025, revenue near ₹100 Cr. Self-funded growth since.
- NowAI-first, Bharat-first
AI Tutor, AI Interviewer, Placed. Courses in Hindi, Marathi, Telugu and Tamil. The thesis moved from "make coders" to "make people employable in an AI-shaped market."
What seven years of this taught me
-
AI doesn't delete jobs. It reprices skills.
The same founders who demand AI-fluent engineers still treat using AI in an interview as cheating. That contradiction is where the opportunity lives.
-
A business model is a promise about who carries the risk.
Pay-after-placement puts it on the institution, not the family. When the market broke that promise in 2022, the mistake would have been defending the model instead of the promise.
-
Language should never be a barrier to capability.
The demand curve for AI skills is steepest outside the metros — so we teach in Hindi, Marathi, Telugu and Tamil, not just English.
-
Education stops being a credential factory when you're paid on outcomes.
Judge a school the way you'd judge a startup: placement rates and salary progression, not enrollment.
What I do differently
11–11–6
11am to 11pm, six days a week. Intensity is a filter, not a pedagogy — the schedule is the selection process.
Pay after placement
The school earns when the student earns. Risk sits with the institution, not the family.
Built for Bharat
Non-CS grads, small-town colleges, first-generation tech workers — taught in their own language.