The classroom pilot that changed what she was building

"I still remember the first time children interacted with it," Bindu R says. It was 2025, and she had built her first prototype, SakhiBot, and piloted it in rural government schools in Karnataka. The children "were talking to it, questioning it, and imagining what else it could do." In the same rooms, she says, she saw teachers managing overcrowded classrooms and struggling to give every child individual attention.

"I thought I was building an educational robot," she says. After spending time in classrooms, she realized the real problem wasn't just access to learning content. "Many children lacked individualized attention, emotional support, and meaningful interactions with technology."

“I started building because I didn’t want to spend my life waiting for someone else to solve the problems I could see.”

Bindu R

That experience changed what she wanted to build.

The reason underneath it is her parents. Watching what they struggled with for want of an education is what pushed her to build a company at all.

She did not set out to found anything. "I didn't grow up thinking I would start a company," she says. "I was simply curious." When she started college, she became increasingly interested in how technology was shaping childhood. "Everywhere I looked, I saw children spending more time with screens, but I wasn't convinced that more screen time meant better learning."

Today Bindu is building YANI, an AI-powered emotional and educational companion for children. It is designed to learn with children, talk to them naturally, encourage curiosity, support emotional well-being and make learning more personalized and accessible. Her team is also developing offline and multilingual capabilities "so that children in underserved communities are not left behind."

She does this as a computer science student at RV University. For the last year, most of her weekends, late nights and free time have gone into YANI. "Building YANI while being a full-time university student has been one of the hardest things I've ever done," she says. There have been moments, she says, when prototypes failed and funding didn't come through. Some nights extend well past midnight.

The MVP is built, and has been recognised both nationally and internationally. She and her team have run school pilots and keep improving the product on feedback from children, teachers and parents. They have won entrepreneurship competitions, and the startup team is all women.

"I believe children deserve technology that adapts to them, not the other way around," Bindu says.