Jairaj Bhattacharya and Shashank Pandey never had a fairy tale story to woo investors. But that limitation turned into an asset when the social enterprise founders started navigating the edtech storm
“Nobody ever pushed us saying ‘uthao, uthao, uthao (raise, raise, raise),” says Jairaj Bhattacharya, alluding to an absence of investor pressure to raise more money even during the ‘eccentric’ year of 2021 when India’s edtech sector saw an inflow of a record $4.1 billion funding. “We never had this sense of missing out,” says the co-founder and managing director of ConveGenius, an edtech social enterprise. “Was it ‘sense of missing out’ or fear of missing out (FOMO),” I ask. “Sense,” comes a terse one-word reply. “We always had a sense of who were, and what we were doing,” underlines Bhattacharya.