I’ve always known I wanted to make education more accessible to everyone. Ever since I started working on small projects, everything I’ve done has come back to that — from teaching kindergarten to building edtech solutions. UpSchool is where that thread led.
It started in a preschool classroom in Kolkata, where I taught about twenty children at a time and wished I could reach thousands. When I moved to Berlin for a Master’s in Entrepreneurship, three classmates and I set out to do exactly that. We saw that students with passion but empty CVs were locked out of internships, volunteering and research roles, because every platform was built for people who already had experience. So we built one for people who didn’t. Think LinkedIn, but designed for your very first step.
Before writing any code, we did ethnographic research across four countries, validated the idea with real companies, and secured four letters of intent. Then came the building. I had no technical background, so I taught myself to create the website from scratch, on zero budget. We priced it competitively, reached over 120 students in our pilot, and pitched to APX Ventures, Axel Springer’s Berlin VC.
When COVID hit, international placements disappeared overnight and scaling became impossible. But by then we had what we set out to build: a working product, real partners and real demand.
What I’m proudest of isn’t just the platform. It’s that UpSchool took the same mission I had in that classroom and gave it the chance to reach far more people — and it showed me that when I don’t have a skill, I can go and build it.