For Sumeet Mehta, the idea that learning could be made simpler and more equitable did not arrive as a business insight. It began at home. His father, an English professor, would turn everyday moments into lessons, breaking rotis to explain fractions or using household objects to make abstract ideas concrete. The impact of a committed teacher was visible and immediate. “I saw what a great teacher can do for an entire district,” Mehta recalls, a memory that would later shape his decisions.
Mehta grew up across small towns in Punjab – Pathankot, Gurdaspur and Talwara – before studying electrical engineering at Punjab Engineering College, Chandigarh, and later completing his MBA at Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A). After graduating in 1999, he joined Procter & Gamble (P&G) and moved to Singapore. The corporate track was comfortable, but not persuasive enough. Reading Rich Dad Poor Dad crystallised a thought he had been circling: he did not need to wait decades to pursue what interested him, as long as his personal needs stayed simple. In 2007, he quit his job and returned to India to work in education.
The motivation sharpened as he compared experiences. Students from largest cities arrived at IIM-A with confidence and exposure that those from smaller towns often lacked. “It wasn’t just income disparity. Geography mattered,” Mehta says. Talent existed, opportunity did not. Each trip back from Singapore reinforced another contrast — two countries five hours apart by flight, but decades apart in classroom practice.
Trust Deficit
In 2012, Mehta and his wife, Smita Deorah, a former P&G colleague, acted on the idea by setting up a school in Areri, a village near Ahmedabad. 14 students turned up on the first day. It was not a promising start by conventional measures, but the founders read it differently. Parents were trusting them with their children. That trust, Mehta says, was reason enough to persist.
What followed was less about expansion and more about learning how learning works. Between 2012 and 2015, the couple ran their own schools while studying global best practices, including short programmes at Harvard Graduate School of Education. The most important insight came from the classroom itself. Students from non-English-speaking homes struggled with mathematics and science when taught directly in English. Improving language proficiency first produced measurable gains. The approach worked well enough for the founders to open four more schools in Maharashtra in 2015.
Around this time, other schools began to notice. An institution near Pune asked if it could try the same system. The experiment revealed something larger, that what was being built for owned schools could be replicated elsewhere. The opportunity, Mehta realised, lay not in running a chain of schools but in offering a system that reduced the load on teachers rather than adding to it. The learning model went through multiple iterations over five to six years inside the founders’ own schools before it was ready to be offered externally. By 2018, the focus had shifted decisively to the LEAD Learning System.
Financially, the company remained cautious in its early years. External capital was raised only in 2016, after the operating model had stabilised. The founders approached a small set of impact-focused investors. Some wanted strategic control. Others wanted faster scaling. The conversations that worked were different. Elevar Equity’s partners, Sandeep Farias and Jyotsna Krishnan, visited schools and tested the mission on the ground. Elevar came on board in 2017 as the first institutional investor. Since then, the company has raised $172 million from investors including WestBridge Capital and GSV Ventures.
Scaling the Mission
The next inflection point arrived unexpectedly. Covid-19 forced the firm to move from physical classrooms to running an online school almost overnight. What was meant to support 130 partner schools and about 50,000 students scaled to 1,800 schools and 720,000 students during the pandemic years. When schools reopened in 2022, the organisation had to rebuild its academic and technology infrastructure for a much larger footprint.
That scale is now reflected in numbers. In FY25, the Mumbai-based edtech firm reported annual recurring revenue of `415 crore, a 30% increase over the previous year, and operational revenue of `351 crore. It also reached Ebitda breakeven. Today, LEAD Group works with more than 8,500 schools across over 400 towns and cities.
The product has continued to evolve. The firm now offers differentiated systems for higher-fee schools, lower-fee schools and those experimenting with new formats. It is preparing to launch AI tools such as Ms Curie, a teacher assistant, and Socrates, a conversational system for school leaders. The aim, Mehta says, remains unchanged, that is, to make teaching easier and learning more consistent.
Looking back, the idea behind LEAD Group did not begin with technology or scale. It began with a classroom, a few students, and the decision to test everything in practice before taking it to market.