Azeez Gupta, Namya Mahajan, Siddhant Sachdeva & Utsav Kheria

About

Children of a bureaucrat father, siblings Azeez Gupta and Namya Mahajan, founders of Rocket Learning (an early learning platform), spent a large part of their growing up years in small towns, aware of the social challenges children growing up in marginalised families faced. Giving back to the society was something the siblings wanted to do. Their Harvard degrees landed them swanky corporate jobs, which they gave up to launch Rocket Learning in 2020, joined by their co-founders, Siddhant Sachdeva and Utsav Kheria, who also gave up their cushy jobs to make life better for children between ages three and six. The company delivers bite-sized content to parents on their smartphones, which helps strengthen cognitive, gross motor and other essential development skills of children. It is currently working with 4.5 lakh anganwadi workers, and parents of over 60 lakh children across 15 states, as well as with Centre, states and the NITI Aayog. Their bite-sized content could be simple videos about giving kids a bowl of different kinds of pulses and asking them to sort it, or playing a fun game of colours and shapes. The parents are asked to do these activities with their children and let the Rocket Learning team know about the outcomes through a video or a photograph on a WhatsApp group. “We spoke to experts who told us how IQ rises from 87 to 94 depending on the kind of access children have to early childhood development,” says Gupta. The company has reached 30% of India’s public pre-schools.