Sarvesh Shrivastava had spent three decades building other people’s education businesses - Encyclopaedia Britannica’s South Asia operations, NIIT’s global curriculum contracts, Pearson VUE’s Asia-Pacific arm - before he did something no single founder could have pulled off alone. In June 2017, Sarvesh and roughly fifty former colleagues from Britannica’s India edtech team each put in money from their own savings, pooling close to $1 million, and started Eupheus Learning. Today the New Delhi company they built together reports ₹225 crore in annual revenue, works with more than 10,000 Indian schools, and has raised over $27 million from investors including Lightrock India.
Who is Sarvesh Shrivastava, and what did three decades in edtech teach him?
Sarvesh holds a master’s degree in chemical engineering from the University of Illinois, Chicago, and started his career on the industrial side - clearing plastics for optical fibre at Corning, then representing both Corning and Telecom Australia in India as the country opened up its telecom sector in the late 1980s. When deregulation hit in the ‘90s, he built his own company installing optical fibre systems, and along the way picked up India’s first franchise for public payphones.
The turn toward education came at the century’s end, when Sarvesh joined NIIT and began building curriculums - not for India, but for American institutions that were years ahead in adopting e-learning. He went on to run NIIT’s retail centres across more than 600 locations outside India, then took the top India job at Encyclopaedia Britannica South Asia. It was there, watching the gaps between what schools taught, what textbooks assumed, and what home-tutoring apps promised, that the idea for Eupheus took shape.
“You can’t do a startup with a corporate mindset.”
Why did fifty people quit a company together to start one?
Most startup origin stories involve two or three co-founders. Eupheus Learning’s involved roughly fifty - the entire team that had built out Encyclopaedia Britannica’s India edtech operations, all of whom decided together that they’d rather build something of their own.
“We put in whatever money we had saved up as salaried people to start Eupheus, putting in a seed capital of close to a million dollars.”
That decision made every one of them a shareholder from day one, and it shaped how Sarvesh talks about growth even now: the company’s biggest long-term risk, in his own telling, was never running out of capital - it was losing the camaraderie of a team that had all worked together for years once Eupheus had to scale past the founding fifty.
What was actually broken about how Indian schools bought learning material?
Before Eupheus, a school’s learning stack came from unrelated vendors: one company supplied the textbooks, another supplied digital classroom material, and a growing wave of home-tutoring apps supplied remediation - each following its own pedagogy and its own difficulty level. The mismatch showed up in homes across the country. A student taught to solve a problem one way in class would come home to a home-learning app teaching a different method, at a different level, and confusion followed both ways.
Sarvesh had lived this personally, trying to help his own daughter with homework using a method different from what her teacher had taught.
“My daughter ultimately said, please stop teaching me.”
Eupheus’s founding thesis was to close that gap: build the textbook, the classroom digital material, and the home-learning layer on the same pedagogy, sold through the school so there was never a disparity between what a child learned at 9am and what they practiced at home.
How did Eupheus win 1,700 schools in its first year?
Eupheus launched in 2017 with four subjects - math, English, information technology, and grammar — anchored by a textbook. For math, the company adopted the Singapore Bar Model, the visual pedagogy behind Singapore’s consistently strong PISA scores, years before most Indian publishers caught on. The bet worked: the company sold roughly 1.5 million textbooks in year one and signed 1,700 schools.
Distribution ran through school convincing, not consumer advertising. Eupheus’s sales team pitched principals directly, then ran free teacher-training workshops - not to sell Eupheus products, but to teach subjects better - a model closer to how pharmaceutical companies educate doctors than how most edtech firms market to consumers. That approach scaled: by the time Eupheus’s founding-team cofounder stepped back years later, the company had run workshops training tens of thousands of teachers.
Catalog growth followed the same logic. In its second year, Eupheus acquired the entire school catalog of Allied Publishers, an 80-year-old Indian publisher - more than 300 titles, including Dr. Dalal’s Chemistry, used in over 60% of India’s ICSE-affiliated schools. That single deal helped take Eupheus’s SKU count from roughly 32 in year one to close to 900 today, similar in spirit to how B2B-edtech peer Uolo built distribution reach by going through schools rather than around them.
Why did Eupheus spend $19 million buying ClassKlap instead of building it themselves?
Eupheus raised a $4.1 million Series B in 2021 from Kuwait’s United Education Company and Al Rayan Holding, followed months later by a $10 million Series C led by Lightrock India - its largest round to date. Rather than pour that capital purely into organic product development, the company went shopping. In September 2021, Eupheus acquired ClassKlap, a student-personalisation edtech startup, in an all-stock deal valued at roughly $19 million (about ₹140 crore). Five months later, in February 2022, it acquired SchoolMitra, a school-management SaaS platform, giving Eupheus a single sign-on layer spanning curriculum, learning management, and school administration. At the time, the combined reach of the three brands was pitched at more than 20,000 schools nationally. Eupheus has continued raising smaller rounds since - including a $3 million round in December 2024, closed in the middle of what the edtech sector was openly calling a funding winter. Total capital raised now stands north of $27 million, against competitors like LEAD School that have taken a different path to the same schools.
How big is Eupheus Learning today?
The numbers back up the acquisition bet. Eupheus’s revenue more than doubled from ₹99 crore in FY23 to ₹225 crore in FY24, with the company’s leadership pointing to the rollout of India’s National Education Policy 2020 as a tailwind. The company now works with more than 10,000 schools, up from the 5,500 that actively prescribed its products back in 2021, and employs more than 500 people, up from 160. In 2024, Eupheus was named among TIME’s Top EdTech Rising Stars.
Sarvesh had always been clear that scale, for him, wasn’t primarily a revenue story.
“Being an entrepreneur, I would rather not stick to revenue — I would rather stick to how many students I am taking my solutions to, improving their lives. If you ask me what my three-year target is, I would say in three years I want to be present with 10 million students. Revenue is a byproduct.”
Why did Sarvesh Shrivastava step down as Managing Director in 2023?
In October 2023, Sarvesh Shrivastava retired from his role as Eupheus Learning’s Managing Director. Fellow co-founders Amit Kapoor and Ved Prakash Khatri, who had been directors on the board, stepped into the CEO and COO roles respectively. Sarvesh now sits on the Eupheus board as a non-executive director.
It’s a fitting close to a concern Sarvesh raised repeatedly about his own company, back when he was still running it day to day: that the hardest part of growing Eupheus wouldn’t be capital or competition, but keeping the culture of a fifty-person founding team intact as the company scaled well past them.
“How do we grow the organization with the same sense of camaraderie, the same sense of cohesiveness - that will always remain the biggest challenge in my mind.”
Three years after he first said that on record, the team he helped build together is running a ₹225 crore business across 10,000 schools without him in the corner office which, on Sarvesh’s own terms, may be the clearest sign the culture held.
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Sources
Edtech Startup Eupheus Learning’s Cofounder Steps Down — Inc42
Delhi-Based Edtech Startup Eupheus Learning Raises $10 Mn — Inc42
Eupheus Learning Acquires SaaS-based School Administration Platform SchoolMitra — EdTechReview
Eupheus Learning — Company Profile, Funding & Investors — Tracxn
Sarveshwar Shrivastava — Co-Founder & Managing Director — Crunchbase