In ten years, India went from launching UPI to making about 800 million UPI payments a day. We reinvented how a nation pays, shops, travels and works. But step into a student’s day and you could be back in 2005.
School in the morning. Tuition after lunch. Coaching in the evening. Apps and videos late into the night. More than one in four school students now takes private coaching, and in urban areas, more than four in ten students in Classes 11 and 12 do. None of these places talk to each other. The only one holding the whole picture is a child.
The cost lands on all of us. Families pay twice for the same learning: once for school, and again for tuition that tries to fill its gaps. Tax collected from coaching institutes more than doubled in four years. School and tuition runs choke city roads at peak hours. And eight in ten students in Classes 6 to 12 say studies, exams and results make them anxious. This is not a family problem. It is a national drain on time, money and the wellbeing of a generation.
The people best placed to help are held back by the same system. India’s National Education Policy puts the teacher at the center of reform, yet a NIEPA study in five states found government school teachers spent under a fifth of their school hours teaching. Private school teachers tell us the load is no lighter. Schools see only what happens inside their walls. Parents learn how their child is doing a few times a year, often after the moment to help has passed.
We started Mastri because we believe this is fixable, and that the school is where it should be fixed.
Mastri is an AI learning system built specifically for schools, to bring education back where it belongs. It gives students, teachers, parents and school leaders one platform where they see the same honest picture of every student and act on it together. Now every child can receive patient, adaptive, one-to-one support that was once a privilege of the few. Mastri takes grading, tracking and reporting off teachers’ desks so they can mentor and guide. It turns a report card into a living view parents can act on, and gives schools insight to lead with.
Mastri is built by a team that brings two kinds of experience to the problem. Seasoned professionals with long careers in the corporate world bring the discipline of building systems that work at scale, for institutions that can’t afford to get things wrong. Alongside them, young team members who were navigating school, tuition and coaching only a few years ago bring something no research can replace: they remember exactly what it felt like. Together, we build with the rigour to earn a school’s trust and the empathy to earn a student’s.
