Teachmint Revolutionizes Education Infrastructure with India's Leading School Management Platform
In mid-2020, as the pandemic shuttered schools across the globe, millions of teachers were thrust into a digital wilderness. They were juggling Zoom for live classes, WhatsApp for assignments, Google Forms for tests, and spreadsheets for attendance. There was no single, unified home for the classroom. Into this fragmentation stepped Teachmint, an education infrastructure company that didn't just build an app—it built the digital backbone for the future of learning.
Mihir Gupta, CEO and co-founder of Teachmint, recalls the early days with a mix of nostalgia and pride. What started as a viral APK file shared on teacher WhatsApp groups has evolved into a comprehensive SaaS platform powering thousands of schools and colleges. For Mihir and his co-founders, the mission was clear: expanding the potential of education through technology.
The Teachmint Mission
"We are an education infrastructure company solving for the intersection of digital infra and education. Our mission is to expand the potential of education through technology, acting as a complete integrated platform that drives the entire ecosystem forward."
The Bhopal Roots and the IIT Bombay Robotics Team
The story of Teachmint is as much about the team as it is about the technology. Mihir hails from Bhopal, where he attended school with his co-founder Payoj Jain. Payoj, whose family runs a K-12 school in a remote part of Madhya Pradesh, provided the initial industry focus. He saw firsthand how education—unlike almost every other industry—remained stubbornly analog.
Mihir then moved to IIT Bombay, where he spent most of his time building autonomous underwater vehicles. It was in the high-pressure world of international robotics competitions that he met Anshuman Kumar, who now leads Tech and Engineering at Teachmint. Their fourth co-founder, Divyansh Bordia, was a colleague of Mihir’s at McKinsey. This combination of deep product insight, engineering excellence, and consulting-led growth strategy created a formidable founding unit.
The Viral APK: Finding Product-Market Fit in 48 Hours
When the pandemic hit, the founders noticed that teachers were struggling with "disconnected tools." They were using platforms built for corporate meetings (Zoom/Google Meet) rather than pedagogical needs. The team put together a simple Android application—an all-in-one classroom for teachers.
"Even before listing on the Play Store, we gave the APK to a few teachers," Mihir says. "That APK started going viral on teacher WhatsApp groups. We realized there was a real itch that the product was solving."
Founder Tip: Embedding with the User
To achieve rapid P-M fit, the Teachmint team didn't just build in isolation. They embedded themselves in hundreds of live digital classes, speaking to teachers and students daily to understand friction points in real-time. "Be present with the user day in and day out," Mihir advises.
From Teacher App to Education Infrastructure (SaaS)
While the initial growth was driven by individual teachers, Teachmint quickly realized that long-term impact lay in institutional digitization. They transitioned from a free teacher utility to an Integrated School Platform. This SaaS model offers schools a "back-to-front" solution, covering everything from administration and fee management to academic LMS and parent communication.
The Digitization Journey for Institutions
- Standardize Operations: Bringing all administrative tasks—fees, payroll, and attendance—onto a single digital dashboard.
- Enable Visibility: Providing principals and owners with real-time transparency and control over school metrics.
- Empower Academics: A full Learning Management System (LMS) that keeps teachers, students, and parents aligned on one platform.
- Scale with SaaS: Moving from fragmented tools to a unified "School OS" that grows with the institution.
The 4-Founder Dynamic: Shared Stress and Extreme Trust
Having four co-founders is often seen as a risk, but for Teachmint, it was a superpower. Mihir notes that the roles naturally aligned: Payoj leads product (closest to the customer), Anshuman leads engineering (the developer mindset), Divyansh leads growth (the business mindset), and Mihir ties it all together as CEO.
"Four co-founders is a large team, but it allows you to share an enormous amount of stress and responsibility," Mihir explains. "You can divide the 'zero-to-one' stuff. I often wonder about single founders—the amount of stress they must go through without someone to share that journey."
The secret to their harmony? A trust equation where the person with the strongest conviction on a specific functional decision is given the lead, while the others provide support rather than friction.
Bootstrapping vs. Serendipity in Funding
The team originally planned to bootstrap for a year, putting in ₹18 lakh of their own savings (₹6 lakh each from three of the founders). However, early success brought serendipitous interest. An intro to Vaibhav Domkundwar of Better Capital led to a first-pitch commitment, and the company's fast pace soon attracted multiple rounds of funding from global investors like Lightspeed and Rocketship.vc.
— Mihir Gupta, Co-founder & CEO, Teachmint
The Future: Defining the 'School OS'
Today, Teachmint is more than just a classroom app; it is the "School OS" for the digital age. By solving for the intersection of infrastructure and education, Mihir and his team are ensuring that teachers can focus on what they do best—teaching—while technology handles the heavy lifting of management and communication.
As education continues its inevitable shift toward digital-first models, Teachmint stands as a testament to the power of identifying a massive "white space" and filling it with a product built with empathy for the person at the center of it all: the teacher.
About the Guest
Mihir Gupta is the Co-founder and CEO of Teachmint. An alumnus of IIT Bombay, Mihir started his career at McKinsey & Company, where he focused on Southeast Asian markets. He later led expansion and profitability efforts for Oyo in Malaysia and served as a business lead at the fintech startup Open. Under his leadership, Teachmint has raised over $118 million in funding and become India's leading education infrastructure provider, serving millions of users across the globe.