KUTUKI

There are 200 million early learners in India. When we started in 2018, almost none of them had learning content that looked or sounded like their world. Every Indian child was getting the same English nursery rhymes, the same Western characters. India has thousands of songs and stories in dozens of languages — but nothing built from the ground up for a Kannada-speaking three-year-old in Bengaluru, or a Tamil-speaking five-year-old in Chennai.

That was the question KUTUKI started with. Sneha Sundaram and I had been running The Academy — a creative space — and we kept coming back to this gap. We didn't start with a business plan. I wrote the first lines of code, we launched a beta in October 2018 with three content categories, and waited.

People noticed fast

Parents started sending voice notes. Videos of their kids singing KUTUKI songs at home. Teachers showed us recordings of children performing our content at school. Kids were adopting the characters and stories into their daily lives — singing the songs at dinner, asking for specific characters by name. The data backed it up too: strong repeat viewership, clear signals on which categories resonated.

We raised a pre-seed from Jaithirth Rao and Better Capital, went full-time, and started building the content universe for real.

Content, not translations

This was the core bet. We didn't translate English content into Indian languages — we created original content for each language from scratch. A Kannada story referenced festivals, food, and contexts that a Kannada-speaking child would recognize. The characters were A/B tested across several experiments to find a baseline that would appeal to as many kids as possible.

Both Sneha and I come from creative backgrounds — music, film, education. That shaped how we built Kutuki. We ran creative sprints modeled on product sprints: set constraints, give significant creative freedom. The first full-time hire was a young animator passionate about early learning. The team grew to include writers, illustrators, more animators.

By the end, the library had roughly 1,500 original stories and books, plus about 500 learning games built on a custom Flutter game engine. All of it across 10 Indian languages: Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, English, Bengali, Gujarati, Malayalam, and Odia.

The Mann Ki Baat moment

In August 2020, PM Modi spoke about KUTUKI on Mann Ki Baat — a radio address that reaches hundreds of millions. We added as many users in a single day as the entire previous 18 months combined. Before this, growth had been organic: word of mouth, strong content, parents telling other parents.

The visibility triggered our seed round — $2.2 million led by Omidyar Network, with Akatsuki (a Japanese entertainment company) and existing angels.

Partnerships

The deepest partnership was with Google. We powered the phonics and language content on Google Read Along — that drove close to 100 million book reads of KUTUKI content. Apple featured us as a top education app. Jio gave us distribution across their massive user base. All of these came from the strength of original, quality content — not marketing spend.

Pivots and hard parts

COVID forced a revenue rethink. We built a live learning platform — not just bolting Zoom onto the app, but an integrated video experience that used our existing content and pedagogy within live sessions. For thousands of kids, KUTUKI became their first preschool experience during lockdowns.

At peak, we had 1 million monthly active users served by 4 engineers. That ratio wasn't accidental — it came from being a content-heavy, logic-light product. The app was primarily a delivery mechanism for rich media. Cross-platform from day one, managed backend services, product discipline about saying no to features that would increase complexity without proportional value.

The Indian market added its own challenges: device fragmentation across low-end Androids, 2G/3G networks in many areas, price sensitivity around paid education apps, and the fact that supporting 9+ languages isn't 9x the work — it's 9 different cultural contexts, scripts, and content strategies.

What I learned

The biggest one: localization isn't translation. You can't take an English nursery rhyme, swap the words into Kannada, and expect it to land. Each language needs its own content — stories, songs, characters that feel native. We had to learn that the hard way a few times.

Retention matters more than acquisition. Our 95% month-1 retention came from adaptive difficulty and parent engagement loops — not growth hacks. You can't hand-craft 1,500 stories across 10 languages without production pipelines, so we built those early. Enterprise partnerships (Google, Jio, Apple) work completely differently from consumer growth. And if you're building edtech in India, plan for offline-first — 60% of our users had intermittent connectivity.

Where it is now

KUTUKI is still operating, largely on auto-pilot. AI-powered customer experience, a growing YouTube presence, and the content library continuing to serve users across languages. I've stepped back from day-to-day operations and moved into AI building and fractional product work — but the six years of building KUTUKI are hard to shake. Comes up in basically everything I do now.