Simran Mulchandani Built Rangeet by Removing Screens from EdTech
How a former J.P. Morgan trader and Blue Frog founder is reaching 500,000 children with a teacher-first model that bets against everything the industry believed
There is a public school in Malad, Mumbai, where eight-year-olds sit beside twelve-year-olds in the same fourth-grade classroom. The older students are almost all girls. They were kept home for years, some to cook, some to care for siblings, some because their families saw no point in educating a daughter. One student has cognitive challenges. Nobody mentioned this to the volunteer who showed up to teach English articles that day.
Simran Mulchandani stood at the front of that classroom in 2019, a man who had once traded European currencies before the Euro existed, and felt something shift. “I’m thinking to myself, damn, these kids are screwed by a birth lottery,” he told me on the Founder Thesis podcast. “This was literally the result of a birth lottery.”
That evening, he sat down with his colleague Karishma and made a list of everything they hated about the world. They had no idea what they would build. But they knew they had to build something.
Watch the full conversation with Simran Mulchandani here.
From Trading Floors to Nightclub Floors
To understand how Simran arrived at that classroom, you need to understand the two lives he lived before it.
After graduating from Brown University with a computer science degree, he joined J.P. Morgan in New York during the pre-Y2K, pre-Euro era when the European trading desk handled ten separate currencies. His boss sent him to Singapore right before the Asian currency crisis hit in 1997. “I’m sitting in New York watching volatility,” Simran recalled. “And that’s what you want as a trader, right? Volatility going through the roof in Singapore.” He was hooked. Three days after arriving, the global heads offered him a permanent role.
But something nagged at him. “Every year is a race,” he said. “It’s a race to bonuses.”
Then a childhood friend named Ashutosh Fatak showed up with an idea about changing Indian music. Independent artists and session musicians deserved a platform beyond Bollywood. Simran moved back to India with his wife and two children. They started Blue Frog.
Blue Frog became an icon. The entrance was designed like something from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, a tiny door in a mill compound that opened into a cavernous, magical space. Forbes did a deep-dive on their fifth anniversary. Time Out Mumbai wrote that the city’s music scene now had two eras: before Blue Frog and after Blue Frog. The Independent UK named it one of the top ten music venues in the world, alongside the Sydney Opera House and Madison Square Garden.
We built an incredible brand, a brand that even 10 years after closing still has its cachet. From the outside, it must have looked amazing, but I can tell you it was really hard work.
Then came Delhi. And Pune. And Bangalore. They expanded too fast without understanding their new markets. “We went into Delhi to build for ourselves, unfortunately,” Simran admitted. The financial strain weighed down the entire company. In 2015, after ten years, he exited with his laptop, a pair of forgotten sneakers, and one person: Karishma, Blue Frog’s first employee, who would become his co-founder at Rangeet.
The Mountain and the Classroom
The next chapter began at 15,000 feet.
Simran and his family chose Mount Kinabalu in Borneo for his recovery. For most climbers, it’s manageable. For Simran, carrying ninety kilograms and the residue of running a nightclub for a decade, it was brutal. His daughter developed altitude sickness. His wife told him to keep going with their son Ishan. At 14,000 feet, under moonlight, Simran was stopping every twenty steps. He was ready to quit. Ishan, fifteen years old, refused to let him.
He said to me, ‘Come on, Dad, we’ve come this far. I’m not letting you give up.’ He was 15. He’s a cricket player. I support him. But he supported me that day, and I wouldn’t have made it to the top.
At the summit, Simran realized the peak wasn’t his destination. It was his launchpad.
After that classroom in Malad, he and Karishma began building workshops on confidence, creativity, communication. Three-hour sessions on gender, climate, mental health, societal inequity. Then they went to Bangladesh to meet BRAC, one of the largest NGOs in the world. BRAC took them to schools in rice fields and elite international schools in Dhaka. Then they delivered a verdict that changed everything.
“They told us one very simple thing that was blindingly obvious,” Simran recalled. “They said, ‘How important is this Rangeet thing to you? Because you will never scale as a three-hour workshop. Your schools don’t have time.’”
It was the Blue Frog lesson again. They had built for themselves, not for their customer. So they rebuilt. The SEEK curriculum, Social, Emotional, and Ecological Knowledge, emerged from that failure. And they made one decision that set them apart from every EdTech company of the previous decade: the app would be for teachers only. Children would never touch a screen.
No machine can ever teach you how to be a human being. So right from day one, Rangeet was built for teachers.
The Model That Shouldn’t Scale
Here is how a Rangeet classroom works.
The teacher has the app. It contains instructions, training videos, tutorials for every lesson. When the teacher needs to show something to students, they press a button. The content appears on the classroom’s smart TV. No WhatsApp notifications. No phone calls. Just the lesson. If there’s no smart TV, Rangeet prints resource books with only the child-facing content.
The unit economics are startling. Rangeet costs approximately ₹500 per child per year, just 1% of what India spends per child in the public school system. Training a teacher means reaching forty children. Training a master trainer means reaching hundreds of teachers. The entire model is built on the understanding that teachers are the multiplier, not the bottleneck.
The results speak in partnerships and numbers. Oxford University Press approached them to write “My Happiness and Me,” India’s first well-being workbook series for grades 1-8. The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation adopted Rangeet across 250 schools. Pratham, one of India’s most respected education NGOs, now executes their programs. The UN recognized them as a best practice for SDGs 4 and 5. The Brookings Institution featured them in a 2022 policy report. In January 2025, Simran spoke at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Rangeet has now reached over 500,000 children across India and Bangladesh on approximately $500,000 in annual revenue. In 2026, they’re expanding into four African countries.
The market tailwinds are real. India’s Social and Emotional Learning market is projected to reach $1.8 billion by 2033, growing at 17.5% annually. NEP 2020 mandated holistic student development. The post-COVID learning gap, where children returned to school having lost years of social-emotional development, created urgent demand for exactly what Rangeet offers.
If someone tells us, ‘We need some time to get back to you,’ I’m like, ‘Good job. Let’s do this slow.’ Because we’re seeing all of these events taking place because we are investing time.
The Long Game
Most EdTech companies of the 2015-2021 era believed scale came from removing humans from the equation. Gamified apps. Personalized AI tutors. One device per child. Rangeet bet the opposite. Scale comes from empowering the teacher.
Simran’s advisor Sean Bellamy, founder of the Sands School in the UK, put it starkly: “Is maths useful if there are no animals left to count? Is language useful if there are no forests left to describe?”
Anir Choudhary, the friend who gave them their first break in Bangladesh, has now joined Rangeet to lead growth. He built a community of 600,000 teachers in Bangladesh starting with 23. His challenge for the team: reach 100 million children.
They’re building AI features now, but with a clear constraint. AI will support teachers with better feedback and coaching. It will never replace them.
Life is so long. If we can just be committed to the things we love, be open, and not worry about time, everything works out.
For a man who traded currencies through the Asian financial crisis, who built and lost an iconic music venue, who nearly gave up on a mountain in Borneo, patience has become the strategy. The children losing birth lotteries every day now have 500,000 peers learning what no app can teach on its own: how to be human.
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