My only failed venture is one where I took external capital: Pradeep Singh, founder Vidyanext

BENGALURU: Pradeep Singh has headed four companies. He raised external capital for only one of those four firms. And it was the one that had to be sold off, to pay the venture capitalists who invested in it.
It is one of Singh's regrets. “If I had not taken the money we would have grown slower and might have been able to survive,” he says. The company was Talisma, a customer relationship software company founded during the dotcom boom days.
Singh's newest venture, Vidyanext, is bootstrapped -no external money taken.The hybrid online-offline platform helps school going students to find a tutor nearby. It sells a tablet to students and gives study material for free. The tablet also acts as a chat-interface for tutors, parents, the platform and students.
A virtual teaching assistant will prompt students to take a photo of the class notes at the end with relevant tags, which is stored on the device as well as on the Vidyanext cloud. The app reminds the students to revise the notes the next day and even has automated small revision tests.
Vidyanext started as a chain of offline tutoring centres in 2010. The latest avatar took off when Unitus Seed Fund's Will Poole joined Singh as co-founder last December. Within four months the company has gathered more than 400 tutors on the platform with another 900 waiting for approval from the company . It hopes to have more than 3,000 students during the coming academic year.
Born to an army man, Singh was raised across the country. When he was 21 and a third year student at IIT Delhi, Singh, who is a Sikh, decided to cut his long hair. Three months after graduating, he married his love interest from Miranda House in Delhi University. The two are fond of cycling trips, with the longest one they've done being a seven-day, 1000 km tour of the Nilgiris.
Vidyanext makes Singh spend most of his time in Bengaluru, but he says his moorings are in Seattle, where he worked at Microsoft for nine years after graduating from Harvard Business School.
He quit Microsoft in 1994 to found Aditi Technologies, a BPO firm, and moved to Bengaluru. His mission, however, was to found a product company based out of India, and that came to fruition with Talisma. He left Aditi to professionals and went on to run Talisma, until it came crashing down. Aditi, which had revenue of $72.5 million and in which Singh had 50% stake, was sold to Symphony Teleca in 2014.
Singh says that while students in India are increasingly attending school, half of them still don't learn to read or write even in the fifth standard. “Unfortunately, no innovation in education has scaled or helped poor students improve their learning,” says Singh. Clearly, he's hoping Vidyanext will be different.