Why Titan Capital invested in Cuepilot

Most founders raise money to go test an idea.

Ankur Agarwal tested his first. He ran a preschool himself, felt every one of its operational headaches firsthand, and then invested a significant amount of his and his co-founder’s own capital into building the fix — before a single institutional investor was in the picture.

That's the kind of conviction we look for. Here's why we backed it.

The problem nobody in edtech was solving

Open your phone and count how many apps your child's preschool uses to talk to you. A WhatsApp group for updates. A PDF emailed for fees. A printed diary that goes missing twice a month. Canva for worksheets. A cloud folder somewhere for photos no one can find.

Now imagine running the school, not just attending it. Teachers lose 7–10 hours a week to admin work that has nothing to do with teaching. Owners juggle five different tools that don't talk to each other. And every "system" is really just a patchwork held together by group chats.

Every venture capitalist in India has an edtech thesis. Almost none of them have looked at preschools. The money and attention went to K-12 tutoring apps and test-prep platforms. The 2–6 age group — the one stage where habits, trust, and daily parent engagement matter most — was left running on spreadsheets.

That gap is Cuepilot.

What they built

Cuepilot is a voice-native, AI-first operating system for preschools. Teachers talk instead of type — attendance, lesson plans, report cards, and parent updates all handled through voice commands instead of forms. Owners get one dashboard for admissions, compliance, scheduling, and payments. Parents get a single app instead of five disconnected ones.

It's not a school ERP with an AI feature bolted on. It's built assuming AI does the busywork by default.

The numbers that made us pay attention

We don't fall for good stories alone. These are the numbers that turned interest into conviction:

• 88% weekly active usage among teachers, 79% among parents— for a B2B2C SaaS product, that's an unusually sticky number.
• 100% renewal rateamong schools that completed a pilot.
• 160% NDR.Live in India, US, Indonesia and Dubai

Schools didn't describe Cuepilot as "nice to have." In our conversations, the phrase that came up again and again was some version of "parents are addicted to it." And since the product was built first and foremost for teachers, that's where the strongest line came from: one school told us "everything around the school happens through Cuepilot" now — from planning to attendance to talking to parents.

Why this market is bigger than it looks

Preschool software sounds small until you look at what happened to the company that built it first. Procare — the largest player in US daycare software, built pre-AI — was acquired by Roper Technologies in 2024 for$1.75 billion. Brightwheel, a newer challenger, has raised over ₹760 crore chasing the same market. These aren't lifestyle businesses. They're proof that "boring" school infrastructure compounds into real outcomes when it's genuinely sticky.

Now put India and the US together: a combined₹37,000+ croretotal addressable market, with India alone seeing preschool enrollment climb from 68% to 77% since 2020 on the back of NEP reforms. Cuepilot's own serviceable market across both geographies comes in north of ₹10,900 crore — and they haven't touched K-12, government schools, or the B2C parent layer yet.

The team we bet on

Ankur Agarwal(CEO) ran a preschool himself before he built software for one — he's lived the problem from the inside, not just heard about it in customer calls.Manav Kedia(CTO) spent years as a senior engineer at Instagram before deciding to build voice-native infrastructure for four-year-olds' report cards.

That's a founding team that didn't start with a pitch deck. It started with an operator who'd felt every one of these pain points firsthand, teaming up with an engineer who could actually build the fix.

What we're watching for next

Cuepilot isn't waiting to earn the right to go global. They're already signing up customers in the US market.

We don't invest in every founder who's passionate about their problem. We invest in founders who've already paid the price of proving it — in money, in time, in the years spent inside the problem before they ever built the solution.

Ankur and Manav did that. We're glad to be backing them.

If you're building in a market everyone else calls "boring" — that's usually where we want to talk first.