GyanDhan Revolutionizes Education Financing with AI-Powered Employability Assessment
Higher education is often touted as the "great leveler," the one path that allows a bright student to cross socio-economic boundaries and rewrite their future. But for millions of Indian students, that path is blocked by a massive financial wall. While the cost of a top-tier global MBA or technical degree can exceed ₹1 Crore, traditional banks often limit unsecured loans to a mere ₹7.5 Lakhs—leaving a staggering gap that even the sharpest minds struggle to bridge.
Enter Ankit Mehra, Co-founder of GyanDhan. An IIT Kanpur and IESE Business School alumnus, Ankit witnessed this struggle firsthand when his own colleagues found it nearly impossible to fund their education despite having stellar academic pedigrees. Today, GyanDhan is bridging that gap by using AI to bet on a student’s future employability rather than their parents' current assets.
"Education loan is unique in the sense that it's effectively like infrastructure financing," Ankit explains. "I am investing money in a person, and they will start earning two years from now. You have to bet on the student."
The Crisis in Education Financing
The numbers in the Indian education sector are sobering. Indian students spend approximately $30 billion every year on studying abroad, yet traditional lenders finance only about $2 billion of that total. This disconnect stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of the "product."
The $28 Billion Gap
Why traditional banking fails students:
- Low Limits: Unsecured loan limits are often insufficient for high-cost global degrees.
- Collateral Dependency: Banks default to asset-based lending (homes/property) because they lack models to predict student success.
- NPA Fears: High non-performing asset (NPA) ratios in domestic segments make bankers hesitant to talk to students, even for high-quality courses.
- Process Friction: Cumbersome, manual processes discourage applicants and slow down time-sensitive admissions.
"If my cost of education is one crore and you can only give me 20 lakhs, that's almost like charity," Ankit notes. "It's not going to solve my problem. The product itself didn't exist for the big programs."
The Solution: The GyanDhan Score
GyanDhan operates as a marketplace, connecting students with a wide range of banks and NBFCs. But their real innovation is the GyanDhan Score—a proprietary underwriting model that evaluates a student's resume with the same rigor a top business school might use.
How AI Predicts Employability
The platform evaluates several data points to determine creditworthiness:
- Academic Pedigree: Which school or college did the student attend? What were their scores?
- Standardized Tests: Performance in GMAT, GRE, and other key benchmarks.
- Future Academics: Is the chosen course in demand? What is the placement track record of the target university?
- Professional Experience: For Master's applicants, what is their work history and career trajectory?
By quantifying the probability of a student getting a high-paying job after graduation, GyanDhan allows lenders to expand their pool. A student with high employability can secure an unsecured or semi-secured loan that would have been impossible under traditional banking rules.
More Than Just a Marketplace
GyanDhan doesn't just list loans; they intervene to ensure success. Ankit shares an example of a farmer's son from Satara who was initially turned away by a bank manager who didn't understand the loan product. GyanDhan intervened, escalated the matter through their institutional partnerships, and secured the loan for the student.
The platform also works with lenders to help them devise better education loan policies. By sharing data on employability, they've helped partners increase loan limits and improve conversion rates—sometimes by as much as 50% in a single quarter.
The Founder's Journey: From Capital One to Super 30
Ankit's path to GyanDhan was a "Swadesh" moment. While working at Capital One in the US, he spent years building analytical models for small business lending. This expertise became the foundation for GyanDhan’s data-driven approach.
He was joined by his co-founder, Jainesh Sinha, who brought a deeply personal perspective to the mission. Jainesh was one of the early beneficiaries of Super 30, the legendary program that provides free coaching to underprivileged IIT aspirants. Having seen firsthand what a lack of access to financing can do to talented individuals, Jainesh shared Ankit's vision of solving the problem at scale through a for-profit model.
— Ankit Mehra, Co-founder, GyanDhan
The Meaning of Entrepreneurship
For Ankit, entrepreneurship is a combination of risk assessment and sheer grit. He identifies three critical skills for any founder:
- Storytelling: The ability to communicate your vision and align people with it.
- Intellectual Honesty: Knowing when you don't know something and being willing to accept when the data tells you that you're wrong.
- Perseverance: The internal drive to keep going when everyone else says your idea is "BS."
Today, GyanDhan continues to expand, catering not just to study-abroad students but also to the domestic upskilling market. Their mission remains clear: ensuring that talent is never held back by a lack of capital.
About the Guest
Ankit Mehra is the Co-founder and CEO of GyanDhan, India's first data-driven education financing marketplace. An alumnus of IIT Kanpur and IESE Business School, Spain, Ankit spent over six years at Capital One in Washington DC before returning to India to solve the higher education credit gap. He is an expert in analytical underwriting and is passionate about using technology to democratize access to world-class education. Outside of work, Ankit is an avid gardener and enjoys spending time with his daughter.