Welcome to Season 2 of AI Unveiled! I’m excited for you to hear from some exceptional founders and dive into business building, advice for founders, and, of course, AI.

In this episode, I speak with Deepanshu Arora, Co-Founder and CEO of Toddle, an AI-powered teaching and learning platform for progressive K-12 schools. We cover Deepanshu’s journey of building a global SaaS platform from India, his impact on education, and how AI is transforming the way teachers and students interact in the classroom.

Before founding Toddle, Deepanshu worked as a consultant at McKinsey and ran preschools in India. His personal experience managing a K-12 school led him to start Toddle. What began as a passion project aimed at improving workflow for his own teachers soon scaled into a global SaaS platform. Today, Toddle supports over 150,000 teachers and more than 1.5 million students worldwide.

The main focus of this conversation is AI’s role in education and how it can ease the workload of teachers so they can focus more on what truly matters—engaging with their students and inspiring curiosity. Deepanshu also discusses how AI is helping us get closer to 1:1 personalization, which is considered to be this holy grail in education where you are able to meet each child where they are in terms of their interest, passions, and learning abilities.

We also cover the challenges of running a global SaaS platform from India and how Toddle scaled to over 100 countries, with 70% of their users based outside of India. Toddle’s global appeal is grounded in a deep understanding of teacher workflows, which are remarkably similar across the world. By maintaining a “teachers-first” culture—where every non-engineering and design role, from customer success to marketing, is filled by former educators—Toddle has built an empathetic and highly specialized team that truly understands the needs of its users.

I hope you enjoy this episode!

Timestamps:

* 3:08 – How to build a niche, global community

* 11:45 – Can AI solve the biggest challenges teachers face?

* 19:48 – Toddle’s approach to personalization

* 35:26 – Building a global SaaS company from India

Highlighted Excerpts:

GAURAV: How do you build a global business in India? Are there any best practices that you can share?

DEEPANSHU: In our specific case, what has really helped is that we have a really deep understanding of the teacher persona and how a school functions. What we have realized is that even though there might be geographical nuances, schools around the world work in similar ways.

This means that teachers around the world will have similar workflows and needs from a technology platform so that obviously needs to be there. Your product also needs to appeal to a global audience. If you build something in India, which is a very India-specific use case, then obviously, you can’t take it out.

So, at a fundamental level, it was serendipity for us. It was not addressed by design or anything because we were building it out as a passion project to solve our own problem. But over time, we realized that the core workflows remained the same for us.

DEEPANSHU: Personalization is considered to be this holy grail in education, where you are able to meet each child where they are in terms of their interests, passions, and learning abilities. And for a teacher handling 20 to 25 students at any given time, that’s not possible. But if you have an AI assistant that can actually analyze student performance data for you, that can actually help you create different lesson plans or different assignments for each student that can help you create or curate content that will be most relevant for each student. That is something that is really exciting for us. 

I see that earlier personalization used to be this term that would just be thrown around. But now, with AI, I can see a world five years down the line with AI models becoming better day by day. Personalization might not be that far away.

DEEPANSHU: If you are truly obsessed about the customer, then you can take the business anywhere. So, going back to our teachers’ first core value, Except for design and engineering, everyone else is a teacher. Our marketing team is pretty much entirely teachers. The content team is entirely teachers. All of our sales team are ex-teachers. All of our customer success team are ex-teachers. So we have made sure that we are a team of teachers who serve teachers, and that really helps no matter where in the world you go.