Built from a promise made
in one classroom.

In late 2021, Rakesh Sarma made a two-day journey back to the small town where he grew up — back to the same government school where he'd spent eight years of his own education. He hadn't set foot inside it in over two decades.

The building looked almost unrecognisable. A fresh coat of paint. Smart boards mounted where blackboards once stood. A computer lab with a hand-painted signboard. A backup generator, so the projector wouldn't cut out mid-lesson. On paper — and on the walls — everything about the school had been upgraded.

Then he sat at the back of a Class VIII lesson, the way he used to as a student. And it hit him: nothing had actually changed. A teacher read aloud from a textbook. Thirty-five children copied it into their notebooks in silence. No one asked a question. No one was asked one back. The chalk had become a stylus and the blackboard had become a screen — but the room still worked exactly the way it did when he was eight years old.

"We had spent three decades upgrading the walls of the classroom — and zero years upgrading what happens inside it."

— Rakesh Sarma, Founder & CEO

It wasn't one unlucky school. It's a pattern repeated across classrooms in every state — infrastructure has advanced by decades, while the method of teaching has barely moved: one-way, one-paced, largely passive. Learning outcomes have stayed just as stagnant as the model producing them.

For a long time, fixing this felt like an impossible ask — you can't personally tutor forty million classrooms. But the last few years changed what's possible. AI can now build a lesson, grade a page of handwriting, or adapt a worksheet — instantly, at almost no cost. XR can put a student inside a lesson instead of showing them a picture of one. For the first time, the tools exist to fix the actual problem, not just repaint the room around it. That's the moment LearningPad was built for.