7 years of Masai: How one bold idea changed the way India learns, grows and gets hired

10th June 2019 - 10th June 2026. Seven years. One mission. Tens of thousands of lives transformed.

There's a certain kind of silence that lives in small towns across India. The silence of a first generation learner staring at a laptop screen, wondering if someone like them could ever land a job at a company they've only read about. The silence of a parent who worked two jobs so their child could get a degree that, somehow, still wasn't enough.

Masai School was born to break that silence.

Seven years ago today, Masai started with a belief so simple it almost sounded naive: talent is everywhere. Opportunity should be too. What followed wasn't just the building of an edtech company. It was the building of a movement one placement, one skill, one life at a time.

As Masai turns seven, this is the story of how it got here, what it built along the way, and why the most exciting chapter is still ahead.

The beginning: A classroom without conditions

On June 10, 2019, Masai School opened its doors in a co-working space called BHIVE in Indiranagar, Bengaluru. No fancy campus. No legacy reputation. Just a radical idea and a small team willing to bet everything on it.

The idea was this: a student's future should never depend on their college name, their English fluency, or the money in their family's bank account. It should depend on skill, hard work, and the hunger to grow.

To put its money where its mouth was, Masai launched Pay After Placement, a model that turned the traditional education fee structure on its head. Students would learn first. Pay only after they got placed. No placement, no fee.

People called it risky. Masai called it trust.

That first placement under the model wasn't just a data point on a spreadsheet. It was proof  proof that this approach could actually change lives. And for thousands of families across India who couldn't afford upfront fees at premium institutes, it meant that quality education was finally within reach.

Building brick by brick: The early years

From BHIVE to 91 Springboard to SJR Primus in Koramangala, Masai's office addresses changed almost as fast as its ambitions grew. Every move to a bigger space was quiet evidence that something real was happening here.

In 2021, Masai made a strategic acquisition that would shape its future: Prepleaf, a placement preparation platform that had already built deep expertise in understanding where students struggle aptitude, logic, communication, interview readiness. Bringing Prepleaf into the Masai family meant the team could now understand learners more deeply: their fears, their knowledge gaps, their potential. It wasn't just about teaching code. It was about building confidence.

Then 2020 happened.

COVID hit. Masai didn't stop.

When the pandemic swept through India in 2020, careers became uncertain overnight. Families struggled. Hiring froze. Learners already mid-course were suddenly in a world where the job they were training for seemed further away than ever.

Masai's response said everything about what kind of institution it wanted to be.

The team launched the Student Welfare Fund a support system for learners facing financial hardship, because Masai had always believed that education was about more than placements. It was about standing beside students when things got hard.

They also introduced Glide a monthly stipend of ₹10,000 for learners struggling with basic expenses. So instead of worrying about survival, students could focus on building their future. For many, that support was genuinely life-changing.

This wasn't PR. It was principle.

Growing up: New initiatives, bigger dreams

As Masai found its footing through the pandemic years, new chapters began unfolding. LevelUp, Placed, and Veda each represented Masai's expanding vision more ways to reach more learners, more ways to create lasting impact.

But the most pivotal evolution was the introduction of a Qualifier Process — a stronger, more thoughtful system for ensuring that students who entered Masai's programs were set up for success from day one. Better screening. Better outcomes. More success stories.

Soon, placements weren't a trickle. They were a flood. Masai students were landing jobs across the country at Swiggy, Meesho, Ola, ClearTrip, Paytm, and hundreds of other companies. Families celebrating. Parents tearing up. Lives that had once felt stuck, suddenly moving.

The IIT Revolution:

One of the most significant chapters in Masai's story didn't begin with a product launch or a funding round. It began with a question: why should the IIT name only belong to those who cleared one entrance exam at age 18?

Masai answered that question by building the largest IIT partnership network in Indian edtech.

Today, Masai collaborates with institutions including IIT Guwahati, IIT Mandi, IIT Patna, IIT Hyderabad, IIT Roorkee, IIT Delhi, and IIT Jodhpur alongside IIM Mumbai, IIM Sirmour, IIM Rohtak, IIM Trichy, IIM Ranchi, BITSoM, XLRI, SP Jain, and PwC Academy, among others. That's over 16 institutes of national importance.

The programs co-created with these institutions are designed for three kinds of learners: working professionals looking to upskill, college students building industry-relevant skills, and learners from Tier 2/3 cities who couldn't afford premium education elsewhere. Courses start at ₹60,000 a fraction of what traditional institutions charge for comparable credentials.

When Masai says IIT quality for everyone, it isn't marketing. It's the curriculum.

Masai Convocation Day: 

In 2024, Masai hosted something India had never seen before: India's first-ever EdTech Convocation.

More than 600 alumni gathered on one stage. Learners who had once doubted themselves who had struggled with code, with English, with impostor syndrome walked across that stage as achievers. Industry leaders, faculty, and families came together to honor something real: not a certificate, but a transformation.

Masai Convocation Day wasn't a ceremony. It was a statement. That Masai graduates deserve to be celebrated just as loudly as any university alumnus. That the journey from first-generation learner to software developer at a top company deserves its own stage, its own applause, its own memory.

EmpowerHer: Because opportunity belongs to everyone

In partnership with KSIF (Korea Social Investment Foundation) and AVPN, Masai launched EmpowerHer a 100% free, five-month Web Development bootcamp plus two months of internship support, exclusively for women.

Zero cost. Zero excuses.

Season 1 saw 500 students enrolled, 83 graduates, and 67 internship offers. Strikingly, 70% of participants came from Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, and 80% had no prior tech background. Women who had been on career breaks, women who were raising infants, women who had once dreamed of becoming doctors they came to EmpowerHer and left as software developers.

Season 2 is now live.

Because Masai has always believed that dreams don't belong to one gender. And opportunity shouldn't either.

MisogiAI: Pushing Limits

In 2023, Masai launched what may be its most intense program yet: MisogiAI a no cost, 14-week advanced AI program for working software developers, requiring 90 to 100 hours of commitment per week. Many participants took sabbaticals from their jobs to complete it.

Misogi isn't just a program name. It's a philosophy borrowed from extreme endurance challenges the idea that growth happens at the edge of what feels possible. And Masai's Misogi graduates have proven exactly that, with some of the program's first cohort already attracting interest from international recruiters.

It's also significant that the program is free. No pay-after-placement, no upfront fee. Employers sometimes fund the training in exchange for employees who return AI-ready. The model reflects something deeper: Masai's belief that the best education shouldn't have a price tag attached to access.

Placed: A talent platform for the other India

While Masai was transforming learners, it noticed something else: the hiring side of India was broken too. Talented candidates from smaller cities weren't getting seen. Recruiters were fishing in the same metro pools.

Enter Placed, Masai's AI-powered talent platform for skill-based job matching. Within roughly six weeks of launch, Placed had attracted over 170,000 job seekers. The platform is built to surface talent from places that traditional recruiting never reaches giving someone from Navsari or Dehradun the same shot as someone from Bengaluru.

The Numbers That Tell the Story

Seven years in, here's what Masai has built:

• 60,000+ students trained across 60+ courses
• ₹250+ crore in revenue, crossing a milestone that very few Indian edtech companies reach
• 94% placement rate across programs
• 7,000+ hiring partners in the alumni network
• 300% increase in student placements during one of the toughest hiring markets in recent memory
• 16+ institutes of national importance as academic partners, including 8 IITs and 5 IIMs
• India's first-ever EdTech Convocation, celebrating 600+ graduates
• 170,000+ job seekers on the Placed platform within weeks of launch

But as Masai's own story reminds us numbers were never the biggest achievement. People were.

What have we built?

Masai was never built by offices or milestone announcements. It was built by the student from a small town who typed their first line of code at 11 PM and didn't stop until they had something working. It was built by the mentor who rewrote an explanation four times until it clicked. It was built by the team that stayed through the uncertainty of COVID, through hiring freezes, through every tough quarter.

It was built by learners like Aman Kashyap, whose story Masai's community knows well a student who came with raw talent and left with the skills and confidence to walk into a room full of IIT graduates and hold his own. Stories like his aren't exceptions. At Masai, they're the whole point.

The mission has always been the same: take the talent that already exists everywhere in India in Tier 2 cities, in small towns, in homes where nobody before has ever worked in tech and give it a real chance.

Seven years later, that mission hasn't changed. It's only grown.

Year eight begins today!

Masai is no longer just a bootcamp. It's a career ecosystem with programs in full-stack development, AI engineering, data science, product management, business analytics, digital marketing, and more. It has its own campus. Its own convocation. Its own talent platform. Its own AI program rivaling what international institutions charge ten times more for.So here's to seven years of refusing the easy path. Seven years of betting on the student that the system forgot. Seven years of building something that actually works.

And here's to what comes next.

Because at Masai, the story is far from over.

Want to be part of what Masai is building next? Explore programs at masaischool.com