What happens when an EdTech business starts scaling?
Prateek Shukla, Founder & CEO of Masai School, and Sonya Hooja, Co-founder of Imarticus Learning, both built education businesses meant to make people employable, not just educated.
But how they built and scaled was very different. Here’s what their journeys reveal.
The Gap They Saw
For Masai, the insight was simple. India had plenty of talent, but finding people with the motivation to learn and earn was difficult. The answer was to put students first and build trust by helping them succeed.
For Imarticus, the insight came from personal experience. Sonya and her co-founder worked in campus recruitment and saw that talent was available. But companies spent a lot of time making graduates employable.
There was plenty of online content and courses. What was missing was education that could actually make students employable.
The First Big Challenge
For Sonya Hooja, the challenge was starting a new category. Imarticus is 14 years old now, one of India’s first tech-led education companies. Back then, nothing like it existed. The first job wasn’t teaching. It was earning trust in something new.
For Prateek Shukla, the challenge was changing behaviour. Masai’s first students expected a college-style class. They’d attend for a few hours, then go home, thinking they’d learned everything. Masai had to break that habit fast. They built an intense schedule, 11 am to 11 pm, six days a week, where students finished the day’s task before leaving.
Both challenges were about changing minds, not just building product. Challenges only got harder once each business started to scale.
The Moment That Forced a Rethink
For Prateek Shukla, it came after Covid. Masai batches were hitting 95 to 100 percent placement within 30 to 40 days. Companies wanted more talent, fast. So Masai scaled quickly, growing batch sizes from around 150 students to nearly 1,000. Then the funding winter hit. Hiring froze, just as thousands of students needed jobs.
Masai had to rebuild its process, working directly with hiring companies. Education can’t scale like a consumer business. It has to move at the pace trust allows.
For Sonya Hooja, a pattern kept repeating. Every failure came from solving a problem for themselves, not for the customer. Her lesson was to keep adjusting the business as the mission evolved, instead of waiting for a single wake-up call.
What Breaks First at Scale
For Sonya Hooja, it’s the learner experience. Growth looks good on paper. But the real test is whether outcomes hold up when the student base grows tenfold.
For Prateek Shukla, it’s process, and trust along with it. Processes break in ways founders don’t expect once they scale. And once a learner’s trust breaks, it’s very hard to win back. That’s why scaling has to be systematic, not aggressive.
The Biggest Lie Founders Tell Themselves
One lie is treating education like a content business that scales the way consumer tech does. For Prateek, students also have to put in the work. But the business must create the right environment for them to succeed.
Sonya Hooja points to a second lie. That growth and revenue solve everything. She believes growth matters, but it can’t be the only number you chase. It has to sit alongside unit economics, CAC, and learner outcomes.
Both founders now build with the future in mind, not just the next milestone.
Where They’re Betting Next
Sonya Hooja’s bold bet is AI. She says it will change the way people work, making learning genuinely more adaptable and personalized, for the first time with the tools to actually do it. Her bigger bet is patience. Founders thinking about outcomes four to five years out are the ones who will stick around.
Prateek Shukla’s bet is on perception. He believes edtech deserves more respect from other stakeholders. It’s still looked at as a third party today, but as its impact grows, he thinks that will change and help transform India.
Powering the Business Behind the Growth
A growing education business needs more than the right pedagogy. It needs the infrastructure to turn enrollments into completed payments, across fees, EMIs and outcome-based plans.
PayU helps businesses accept payments and drive customer conversion with:
Payment Gateway: Accept 150+ payment modes with industry-leading success rates, 99.98% uptime and seamless integration across web and app platforms.
Know more about PayU solutions
No One Way to Scale
Masai scaled fast, hit a wall, and rebuilt around discipline and trust. Imarticus scaled slow and steady, choosing unit economics over pressure to grow at any cost.
Different paths, same finish line. Curriculum alone doesn’t build a great education business. What matters is the learner experience, the outcomes, and staying focused on the customer.
PayU powers platforms like Masai School and Imarticus Learning, so founders can focus on building what’s next.
