By Aditya Raj
The IIT Bombay alumnus, who helped build one of India’s most-watched proptech stories of the last decade, is now leading growth at a profitable edtech company serving private and government schools across the country. When Schoolnet India announced its acquisition of Mumbai-based AI learning platform Genius Teacher in July 2024, the deal drew attention not only for being a rare all-stock transaction in an edtech sector still recovering from pandemic-era excess, but also for the founder at the centre of it. Advitiya Sharma, co-founder and chief executive of Genius Teacher, had built the company over eight years after exiting Housing.com, the proptech startup he co-founded straight out of IIT Bombay in 2012.
With the Schoolnet deal, Sharma has taken on the role of Chief Growth Officer at the Noida-based education technology provider, which reported a revenue of Rs 429 crore and EBITDA of Rs 69 crore for the financial year 2023-24. For Sharma, the move represents his second company to be acquired, and a transition from founder-operator to growth leader at a business already operating at scale.
Early years in Jammu
Sharma grew up in Jammu in a family of doctors. His father is a neurosurgeon and his mother a gynaecologist. Despite the medical pedigree at home, he took the engineering route, making it to the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay in 2007 to study Aerospace Engineering. He completed his dual degree in 2012.
Outside academics, Sharma was a national-level footballer. At IIT Bombay, he was part of the Inter-IIT football contingent and went on to captain his hostel football team, alongside positions as mentor and hostel ward nominee during his years on campus. In interviews, he has credited much of his worldview on teamwork and persistence to his time on the football field.
The Housing.com years
In June 2012, shortly after graduation, Sharma co-founded Housing.com with a group of IIT Bombay classmates. The idea emerged from their own experience of struggling to find rental accommodation in Mumbai after college. The founding team set out to build a map-based property discovery platform with verified listings, positioning it against the traditional classifieds-driven real estate market in India.
The company scaled rapidly. It raised $2.5 million in Series A funding from Nexus Venture Partners in June 2013, followed by a $19 million round led by Helion Venture Partners in April 2014. By December 2014, Housing.com had closed a $90 million round led by SoftBank Capital, making it one of the most highly funded proptech companies in India at the time. During this phase, Sharma handled marketing and was closely involved in the company’s brand positioning.
He briefly worked at management consulting firm A.T. Kearney in parallel before leaving to focus full-time on Housing.com. In interviews, he has said the structured corporate environment did not match the pace and autonomy he found in running his own company.
Sharma exited Housing.com in March 2016 as the company entered a turbulent phase marked by management restructuring and leadership changes. Housing.com was later acquired by REA India in 2017.
Pivoting to education
Within weeks of leaving Housing.com, Sharma began building Genius Teacher, an AI-driven quiz-based learning platform focused on K-12 students. He co-founded the company with Shashank Pachore and Ruturaj Atre, both fellow IIT Bombay graduates. The product was built around mathematics, science and English, using short-form quizzes and assessments as the primary learning unit rather than long video lectures, which dominated the edtech category at the time.
Genius Teacher raised approximately Rs 24.6 crore (around $3 million) across multiple rounds from investors including CRED founder Kunal Shah, former WhatsApp India head Abhijit Bose, educationist Lina Ashar, AngelList syndicates and the VKG Group. At the time of its acquisition, the company said its platform reached nearly 2.5 million students, covering CBSE, ICSE and five state board syllabi.
The Schoolnet acquisition
The July 2024 transaction with Schoolnet India, a profitable education technology company that serves both private and government schools, was structured as an all-stock deal at an undisclosed multi-million dollar valuation. Sharma has said the decision to merge rather than raise another institutional round was deliberate. “We had offers from institutional investors for funding, but felt there could be a bigger game to be played by joining forces with Schoolnet,” he said in the statement announcing the deal.
He added that in an edtech environment where several venture-backed companies were still struggling to achieve profitability, Schoolnet stood out as a Make in India company that had built scale while remaining profitable. Schoolnet’s managing director and chief executive officer, R.C.M. Reddy, said the company had worked closely with Genius Teacher for over a year before the transaction, citing the team’s strengths in artificial intelligence and product.
Post-acquisition, Sharma leads growth strategy at Schoolnet, with a mandate to expand the company’s footprint across private schools and integrate AI-enabled learning products into Schoolnet’s existing smart-class and teacher app ecosystem. Schoolnet has publicly set a target of reaching 10,000 private schools over the next three years.
Recognition and public profile
Sharma was named to Fortune India’s 40 Under 40 list in 2014 and again in 2015 for his role in building Housing.com. He has been profiled on CNBC-TV18’s Young Turks, a long-running programme that tracks emerging entrepreneurs in India, and appeared in the network’s coverage of Schoolnet’s acquisition of Genius Teacher. YourStory and NDTV have featured his entrepreneurial journey, and he has delivered a TEDx talk on startup building and problem-solving. Sharma is among a cohort of IIT Bombay founders from the early 2010s whose first ventures helped define a generation of Indian consumer internet companies, and who are now building or leading their second and third acts. At Schoolnet, his focus shifts from founder to operator at scale, at a time when India’s edtech sector is being reshaped by consolidation rather than valuation-led growth.
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