Raising Superstars
1. What made you start Raising Superstars?
When our son was born, Shraddha and I looked for an early-learning program that was simple, joyful, and made for parents. We could not find one, so in 2020 we built our own. Today, the programs that parents run at home with us are used by families in more than 150 countries. We won a deal on Shark Tank India, and TIME ranked us #4 on its list of the World's Top EdTech Rising Stars.
Along the way, we saw a much bigger problem. About 90% of a child's brain develops by the age of six, yet in India organised education usually starts only after that. And every option parents have for these years has gaps. Playschools vary a lot in quality, a good one may not be near your home, and the timings are fixed. In a class, one teacher looks after many children. Online classes put a small child in front of a screen, and the WHO advises no screen time at all for children under two. Activity boxes leave all the planning and teaching to the parent, and most working parents simply do not have the time to do it well, week after week.
2. What exactly is Prodigy Pathway?
Prodigy Pathway is a complete early-learning program for children from 0 to 3 years, delivered at home. A trained Prodigy Coach comes to your home one to five times a week and runs a session of about an hour, with around 20 short, joyful activities. In one session, your child moves, sings, talks, builds, counts, looks at reading cards, and plays memory games and pretend games.
Everything is done for you. Every session is planned by our curriculum team. The materials come in a big Playkit every quarter, which is yours to keep, and the coach brings the rest. After every session, you can see in your app exactly what was done and how your child responded.
3. How is Pathway different from a playschool or a home tutor?
In a playschool, one teacher handles a whole class. With a home tutor, everything depends on that one person: what they know, what they plan, and how they teach on that day.
Pathway works differently. The planning, the materials, the training and the checks all come from our system, not from one person. So every family gets the same standard, whichever coach comes home. If a coach ever changes, nothing changes for the child, because the plan, the materials and the child's full record stay with us.
Your child also gets one-to-one attention at home, at their own pace, with no travel, no fixed class timings, no tests and no homework.
4. What goes into planning a single session?
Much more than most parents imagine. We started by studying more than 85 of the world's best-known teaching methods, including Montessori, Reggio Emilia, Waldorf and the Singapore way of teaching maths, and kept what works best for each part of a child's growth. Then, before designing a single activity, we set clear objectives for every three months of a child's life: for the body, for language and thinking, for creativity, for feelings and relationships, and for inner calm.
Each objective is linked to activities from our library of more than 6,000 activities, and every activity has a written lesson plan with the steps, the words to use, safety points, and an easier and a harder version. Every session is then planned like a timetable. A difficult activity is followed by an easy one, a new activity by a familiar one, and active play by quiet play, so a small child stays happy and interested for the whole hour. Activities come back every few weeks, a little harder each time, until the child has learnt the skill.
We build and test our curriculum the way software is built. Everything is checked before it reaches a home, and improved continuously using feedback from every session.
5. Who are your coaches, and how do you check every session?
All our coaches are women with an ECCEd or B.Ed qualification, or several years of experience in a preschool or daycare. Each one is interviewed in person and reference-checked, and then trained by us for about four weeks across more than 1,500 activities, including safety and child protection. She also does more than 40 assistant sessions alongside an experienced coach. She is certified only after passing every test, she is recertified every year, and she is guided by an experienced Family Manager.
Every session is then checked in three ways. The coach writes a handwritten note in your child's Prodigy Passport. She marks every activity in her app, and you see the same report in yours, where you can tell us if anything was missed and rate the session. And every session is audio-recorded.
6. What role do parents play?
Any parent or caregiver can be part of the session, and family members can take turns. For the child's safety, a parent or caregiver is always in the room and takes care of the baby's needs, while the coach runs the learning. Parents see what is done and why, and can carry it into the rest of the week. Because every session is recorded in the app and in the Passport, whoever is at home always knows where things stand.
7. How do you use AI while keeping the program screen-free?
AI never comes in front of the child. There are no tablets, videos, or screens in a session. The child learns from a real person, with real materials, because that is how young children learn best.
All our AI works behind the scenes, for the adults. It helps our team design and check the curriculum, plan sessions, train coaches, and keep records of every session. This frees the coach to give her full attention to the child, and it lets us keep the same quality in every home as we grow.
8. How do you use AI to track a child's growth and progress without tests?
Small children cannot tell you what they have learnt, so we watch them closely. After every session, the coach ticks off what the child did from an age-appropriate list, notes the activity they enjoyed most, and adds a short voice note. Parents can add what they notice at home too.
Our AI writes out every voice note, in any language, and matches it to our list of more than 6,600 things we look for, covering more than 480 skills, step by step, from birth to three years. This builds one record of your child's growth, skill by skill. Every three months, our AI uses this record to write a Progress Reflection: what your child loves, where they shine, the next small step, and three things to try at home. Every line comes from something that was actually seen, and the coach and her team leader check it before it reaches you.
We never test, score, or compare children. We look for their strengths, not their gaps.
9. How have parents responded, and what has been the hardest part?
Families across Mumbai have taken to it quickly, and Pathway now runs more than 1,500 home sessions a month. What parents tell us they value most is that they finally understand why each activity matters, and know what to do with their child for the rest of the week.
The hardest part has been making quality the same in every home. In most education, a good experience depends on getting a good teacher. We spent years building the system that makes every session meet one standard, so that families do not have to depend on luck. The other was saying no to screens for children, even though building a mobile app would have been much easier.
10. What is your vision, and how will AI change early learning in India?
Our goal is to build the Montessori of the 21st century: an early-learning method made in India, for the world. Maria Montessori created her method more than a hundred years ago, largely for classrooms. A child born today starts learning from birth, often at home with working parents, and will grow up in a world shaped by AI. That child needs a method built for today. Over the next three years, we plan to take Pathway to more than 15 cities, with over 2,000 coaches and 18,000 children.
AI will also change what children need to learn. When machines can answer almost any question, what will matter most is curiosity, confidence, adaptability, and a love of learning. These are built in the first six years, through play and through the real people around the child.
