- Current role
- Chief Executive Officer
- Company
- Ashva Learning
- Experience
- 18 years
- Industry
- Education
- Based
- Bengaluru
About
Sandhya Nair took over as chief executive of Ashva Learning in early 2026, joining a company that had cut its workforce by roughly forty per cent over the previous two years and was rebuilding around a smaller school-partnership business.
She spent seven years at Rupaya building its lending business, and before that ran category operations at a consumer marketplace. She is not an education specialist, an appointment the board defended on the grounds that Ashva’s problem was unit economics rather than pedagogy.
Nair’s first act was to end the company’s direct-to-consumer tutoring line, which accounted for a substantial share of revenue and all of its losses. She has committed publicly to a single operating target — contribution-positive by the end of the 2027 financial year — and declined to give guidance on anything else.
Leadership perspective
- Why shut the largest revenue line?
- Because it was the largest loss line and we were describing it as traction. Once you say that sentence out loud in a board meeting, the decision makes itself.
- Does it matter that you are not from education?
- It mattered enormously for the first ninety days, and I made mistakes because of it. It matters less now, because the problem in front of us is arithmetic.