How Prateek Maheshwari built one of India's most prominent education companies
Prateek Maheshwari has helped build one of India's most prominent education companies by staying focused on students and not milestones.
- Aug 6, 2026,
- Updated Aug 6, 2026 6:19 PM IST
Long before India’s ed-tech sector was forced to confront questions around sustainability, Physics Wallah was quietly building a different kind of company. While much of the industry chased scale through aggressive marketing and capital-fuelled expansion, the company doubled down on affordability, technology ownership, and operational discipline. Today, as Physics Wallah has evolved from a digital learning platform to a `38,000-crore education company spanning online, offline, and skilling businesses, Prateek Maheshwari has emerged as one of the key architects behind that journey.
Working alongside Co-founder Alakh Pandey, Maheshwari focused on building the systems that would allow the company to scale without losing sight of its original mission, to make quality education accessible to millions of students.
That philosophy shaped some of Physics Wallah’s most defining decisions.
Speaking with Business Today, Maheshwari describes on how Physics Wallah continued to grow post-pandemic, when offline came back despite other ed-tech start-ups struggling. He says, “We never saw it as online versus offline. The academic model stayed the same; only the delivery expanded. Because we had already built our own technology stack and earned students’ trust, we could scale sustainably while others were rebuilding.”
For Maheshwari, however, the real lesson predates Physics Wallah. His experience at PenPencil, a coaching software business built before PW, offered a front-row seat to how India’s coaching ecosystem functioned. More importantly, it reinforced a simple truth as he points that parents don’t choose an education brand because it has raised capital; they choose one they trust with their child’s future. That understanding made the founders cautious about pursuing growth at any cost, even when investor enthusiasm for edtech was at its peak.
It also explains why the return of offline education after the pandemic never felt like a disruption to Physics Wallah. Rather than viewing classrooms and digital learning as competing models, the company saw them as complementary. “Vidyapeeth and Pathshala aren’t coaching centres bolted on to a YouTube channel, they’re an extension of the same academic systems and technology we’d already built.”
But Maheshwari insists the business isn’t built around unrelated verticals; it is designed around a student’s learning journey.
That thinking for Physics Wallah may have shaped both organic expansion and acquisitions including strengthening its reach in regional markets through Xylem, expanding into civil services with Utkarsh, or building businesses such as PW Skills.
Today, for Maheshwari, institution-building less as exercising control and more as creating repeatable playbooks. If there is one area where his perspective has remained remarkably unchanged, it is his definition of success.
Physics Wallah closed FY26 revenue at `3,900 crore, while losses narrowed to `24 crore. Revenue and financial performance continue to matter because they indicate whether the business model is sustainable. But they are no longer the headline metrics as per the co-founder. Instead, Maheshwari points to the stories of students—a gas cylinder loader who secured admission to IIT BHU, a Hindi-medium student who became the first doctor in the family, or a young girl preparing for the Mathematics Olympiad on a phone bought through her father’s EMIs. These, he believes, are the outcomes that justify the business.
That lens also shapes how he views wealth as he was recently mentioned in the Hurun rich list.
For Maheshwari, early on, success meant something fairly narrow, active users, revenue, whether the unit economics worked. “Those things still matter enormously, we’ve never really seen building something sustainable and building something meaningful as being in tension. If the business keeps delivering on that promise, the rest, including wealth, is simply a by-product,” he added.
On what he feels getting featured on the Hurun list, Maheshwari says that a net worth figure is a snapshot of a market’s opinion on a given day, and it’ll keep moving with the market. But sustainable value creation for shareholders and serving students well aren’t separate things for the company.
For Maheshwari, the real validation lies in showing that low-cost, high-volume models built for Bharat can create both impact and enduring value.
@PalakAgarwal64
Long before India’s ed-tech sector was forced to confront questions around sustainability, Physics Wallah was quietly building a different kind of company. While much of the industry chased scale through aggressive marketing and capital-fuelled expansion, the company doubled down on affordability, technology ownership, and operational discipline. Today, as Physics Wallah has evolved from a digital learning platform to a `38,000-crore education company spanning online, offline, and skilling businesses, Prateek Maheshwari has emerged as one of the key architects behind that journey.
Working alongside Co-founder Alakh Pandey, Maheshwari focused on building the systems that would allow the company to scale without losing sight of its original mission, to make quality education accessible to millions of students.
That philosophy shaped some of Physics Wallah’s most defining decisions.
Speaking with Business Today, Maheshwari describes on how Physics Wallah continued to grow post-pandemic, when offline came back despite other ed-tech start-ups struggling. He says, “We never saw it as online versus offline. The academic model stayed the same; only the delivery expanded. Because we had already built our own technology stack and earned students’ trust, we could scale sustainably while others were rebuilding.”
For Maheshwari, however, the real lesson predates Physics Wallah. His experience at PenPencil, a coaching software business built before PW, offered a front-row seat to how India’s coaching ecosystem functioned. More importantly, it reinforced a simple truth as he points that parents don’t choose an education brand because it has raised capital; they choose one they trust with their child’s future. That understanding made the founders cautious about pursuing growth at any cost, even when investor enthusiasm for edtech was at its peak.
It also explains why the return of offline education after the pandemic never felt like a disruption to Physics Wallah. Rather than viewing classrooms and digital learning as competing models, the company saw them as complementary. “Vidyapeeth and Pathshala aren’t coaching centres bolted on to a YouTube channel, they’re an extension of the same academic systems and technology we’d already built.”
But Maheshwari insists the business isn’t built around unrelated verticals; it is designed around a student’s learning journey.
That thinking for Physics Wallah may have shaped both organic expansion and acquisitions including strengthening its reach in regional markets through Xylem, expanding into civil services with Utkarsh, or building businesses such as PW Skills.
Today, for Maheshwari, institution-building less as exercising control and more as creating repeatable playbooks. If there is one area where his perspective has remained remarkably unchanged, it is his definition of success.
Physics Wallah closed FY26 revenue at `3,900 crore, while losses narrowed to `24 crore. Revenue and financial performance continue to matter because they indicate whether the business model is sustainable. But they are no longer the headline metrics as per the co-founder. Instead, Maheshwari points to the stories of students—a gas cylinder loader who secured admission to IIT BHU, a Hindi-medium student who became the first doctor in the family, or a young girl preparing for the Mathematics Olympiad on a phone bought through her father’s EMIs. These, he believes, are the outcomes that justify the business.
That lens also shapes how he views wealth as he was recently mentioned in the Hurun rich list.
For Maheshwari, early on, success meant something fairly narrow, active users, revenue, whether the unit economics worked. “Those things still matter enormously, we’ve never really seen building something sustainable and building something meaningful as being in tension. If the business keeps delivering on that promise, the rest, including wealth, is simply a by-product,” he added.
On what he feels getting featured on the Hurun list, Maheshwari says that a net worth figure is a snapshot of a market’s opinion on a given day, and it’ll keep moving with the market. But sustainable value creation for shareholders and serving students well aren’t separate things for the company.
For Maheshwari, the real validation lies in showing that low-cost, high-volume models built for Bharat can create both impact and enduring value.
@PalakAgarwal64