The idea behind edtech firm Leverage did not emerge from a pitch deck or a market gap analysis. It came from a rejection that felt personal. In his early 20s, Akshay Chaturvedi had secured admission to Oxford University’s Saïd Business School, only to realise that the tuition fee — over £60,000 — put the offer firmly out of reach. The admission letter arrived. The celebration followed. The calculation ended the dream. “It felt like failure,” he says. “Only later did I understand that it was really about access — who gets it and who doesn’t.”
That moment stayed with him. Chaturvedi had already spent years experimenting with small ventures. At nine, he ran an evening club from his government housing society in Delhi, charging children Rs 100 a week to read comics, play Prince of Persia on a home-assembled computer or watch the Disney channel. In school and college, he organised large “conti parties” across Delhi and later ran a small export initiative linked to an NGO through his AIESEC network. The ventures were modest, but the lessons were not: fix supply before demand, watch cash flows closely, and do mental math before taking risk.
The Oxford rejection gave those instincts direction. During his MBA at ISB Hyderabad in 2014, where he served as director of the student board, Chaturvedi began studying the economics of higher education and global mobility. The early insight was simple, that aspiration was abundant, but information, financing and trustworthy guidance were fragmented.
From Mentor App to Global Marketplace
Leverage began that year as a rudimentary mentor marketplace app, an orange-coloured, functional rather than elegant. It attracted a few thousand downloads, enough to win a $10,000 prize from a Draper Ventures incubator and a six-month programme in Silicon Valley. Getting there required another leap of faith. Chaturvedi cold-emailed Kunal Bahl minutes before midnight, asking for help with airfare. The reply came two minutes later. “That one act of kindness got me on the plane,” he recalls.
At Draper, where he was the only Indian founder selected that year, the company pivoted. The model expanded from peer mentorship to a broader marketplace that served students, universities and eventually employers. The technology stack kept evolving with the times, first an app, then API-led systems, and now AI-driven workflows. Leverage was formally registered as a company in 2017.
Scaling the Stack
As the business grew, Chaturvedi realised that solving admissions alone was insufficient. Student mobility involved many interlinked decisions: financing education, finding housing, navigating visas, and securing early career outcomes. The company gradually moved towards a full-stack approach. What began as a single product became a group offering study-abroad services through Leverage Edu, education financing via Fly Finance, accommodation support through Fly Homes, and career services under Leverage Careers.
The operating philosophy remained consistent. Students did not need another opaque consultancy; they needed a system that worked predictably across stages. Transparency, measurable outcomes and trust became design principles. Chaturvedi still spends time each day on the platform, responding directly to queries to understand both friction points and unmet needs.
Leverage’s first office was a small rented space in Connaught Place, with two words written on a whiteboard at reception: Student First. The phrase travelled with the company as it expanded. Today, Leverage operates across 27 countries through 57 offices, supported by a team of more than 1,000 people. It has also been building offline experience centres to improve onboarding and trust, with 15 centres now live across India, including a recent addition in Jaipur.
Institutional capital arrived slowly. Of 88 investors pitched, 22 angels came on board in the early days. The first institutional round followed in 2018, led by Blume Ventures and DSG Consumer Partners. The process was anything but linear. One pitch involved chart paper instead of slides; another happened inside a car during a delayed meeting amid a dust storm in Gurugram. “Most investors weren’t convinced by spreadsheets alone,” Chaturvedi says. “They wanted to see whether this could change how things worked.”
The financials now suggest scale has followed intent. Leverage has raised just over $40 million in equity funding so far. The company closed FY25 with revenue of over Rs 180 crore, up from Rs 90 crore the previous year. In the first half of FY26 alone, it generated more than Rs 200 crore and is on track to close the year at Rs 370-380 crore. Profit after tax stood at Rs 12-13 crore in the first half of FY26, with full-year profits expected to cross Rs 25 crore, marking a sharp turnaround from a loss of Rs 65 crore in FY25.
For Chaturvedi, those numbers matter, but they are not the origin story. Leverage was born from a moment when ambition met constraint. Its execution has been about reducing that gap, not by promising dreams, but by building systems that make access less accidental and outcomes more predictable.