Outsourcing Learning: Designed in Bengaluru, Taught in America 

India’s edtech boom may have fizzled out, but in its wake, it left domestic talent equipped to build digital learning ecosystems. India is now becoming the global innovation backbone for education technology, catering to GCCs on the hunt for talent pools in research, curriculum development, faculty training, and the digitisation of offline programmes.

Recently, Curriculum Associates, a leading US-based edtech company, expanded its India centre in Bengaluru. Since its launch in 2024, the centre has grown from 30 to nearly 250 employees. The office at Prestige Tech Park now spans 40,000 sq ft—up from the previous 17,000 sq ft—and can accommodate 315 employees.

The idea behind the expansion is to engage Bengaluru’s skilled engineering and AI talent and contribute directly to Curriculum Associates’ global product roadmap. As AI reshapes education globally, its India teams are solving some of the most pressing challenges facing educators, including personalised learning, teacher workload, and accessibility. 

Speaking with AIM, Kelly Sia, CEO of Curriculum Associates, said the company has an ambitious goal of helping every student reach grade-level learning. “We’re a mission-driven organisation, currently serving 17 million students and over a million educators across the US,” she said.

With two-thirds of fourth graders in the US currently below reading proficiency, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the challenge is significant.

That’s where the India team comes in, with the country to account for 15% of Curriculum Associates’ global workforce. While the team was initially focused on business development when the company entered two years ago, the Bengaluru centre has since expanded into product, marketing, operations, and engineering.

“All our teams from Bengaluru are involved in some of our major product roadmap decisions,” mentioned Rajeev Kapoor, VP, Curriculum Associates, India.

i-Ready and the Role of India Teams

At the heart of this contribution is deep engineering and AI-led innovation. The India team is driving critical features across i-Ready, a K-8 online platform for math and reading, including “the engineering work to enable the next generation evaluation of students leveraging CA’s bespoke Voice AI tools,” Kapoor mentioned. These tools help assess student learning at scale.

“It has taken years of research and close collaboration with educators to ensure i-Ready delivers strong results while meeting the needs of students and teachers,” Kapoor added.

An example of this work is an AI-enabled literacy task currently in the alpha stage, designed to help educators assess students more efficiently and reduce the burden of one-on-one evaluation. The Bengaluru team will now advance the literacy task from alpha to beta in 2026, ahead of a planned full-scale launch.

Beyond assessment, the Bengaluru team has also built the eReader, a digital application that “provides a digital version of textbooks for students and teachers, which emulates a physical textbook,” Sia added.

The teams work on universal tools for test automation and code deployment, ensuring the platform remains scalable, reliable, and future-ready. 

Another key initiative is i-Ready Studio (iStudio), an educator-focused hub designed to streamline professional learning and support teachers with AI-driven insights. The platform “complements i-Ready Connect by linking teacher growth with student success through personalised tools and certifications,” Kapoor added.

India teams are also leveraging AI to automate electronic documents, making them more accessible to teachers and school leaders. This work acts as a companion to the accessibility (a11y) initiatives for student-facing software, in line with Curriculum Associates’ commitment to inclusive education.

The impact of this work is already measurable. India-built features support Curriculum Associates’ Big Hairy Audacious Goal of reaching 25 million students, while continuing to serve the existing US base. 

Beyond tools, the company also ensure sales, training, shipping, and service capabilities can scale alongside product innovation.

A key challenge is ensuring that technology built offshore deeply understands local classroom realities. Curriculum Associates addresses this through deliberate immersion and training. 

“We build SMEs (subject matter experts) through many in-person and virtual trainings, and enabling travel to the US, where our team members visit schools and shadow professional training sessions,” Kapoor noted. Additionally, all employees are trained in the US education system as part of onboarding, “thus laying a strong foundation of the edtech domain in the US market.

From India to US

However, Curriculum Associates is not yet prepared to enter the Indian edtech market and wants to continue building for the US.

Kapoor explained, “Entering a new market requires substantial research and careful work to ensure the instructional approach, support, and implementation are truly aligned to local needs. We’re not closing the door to future opportunities in India, but any expansion would be a longer-term decision made with considerable care.”

While the Indian edtech landscape, currently valued at $7.5 billion, is projected to grow to $29 billion by 2030, according to IAMAI and Grant Thornton Bharat, it has had its share of ups and downs. 

The sector saw a sharp surge in funding during the pandemic, followed by a significant slowdown as students returned to offline learning and edtechs struggled to sustain demand. According to Tracxn, over 2,100 edtech startups in India shut shop over the past five years, as many over-indexed on aggressive customer acquisition and built business models heavily dependent on venture capital rather than long-term institutional buyers.

The US has now become a more attractive edtech market. Many edtech leaders, including Scaler Academy, Emeritus, and Simplilearn, strengthened their international footprint, with a primary focus on the US, capitalising on the demand for upskilling in AI, tech, and test prep.

Moreover, GCCs now provide what many Indian startups lacked during the boom years—patient capital, clear product-market fit, enterprise customers, and long-term technology bets.

Curriculum Associates is just one example of learning ecosystems being built in India and taught in America. From Voice AI, driven assessments to educator-centric AI hubs, the work being done in Bengaluru is shaping classrooms thousands of miles away.

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