About

We think the world has been measuring the wrong thing.

For a century, intelligence has been judged by what a person produces. The score on the test. The answer on the page. Agnira starts somewhere else, with a definition we are willing to defend.

Our position

Intelligence is not what you know. It is how you build understanding.

We define intelligence as the quality of the process by which a mind turns information into understanding. Not the facts retained, but the work of making meaning from what you meet. That definition sounds small. It is not. It quietly reorganises everything.

If intelligence is a process, then measuring outputs tells you almost nothing about it. A child can answer correctly and have understood nothing. Another can fail the question and have grasped the idea. The mark records the surface. The process underneath, the thing that actually decides a life, goes unmeasured. That is the gap Agnira exists to close.

We do not measure what a person produces. We measure how they come to understand.

What we are building

A growing, standardised record of how understanding develops.

We began with reading, because reading is where comprehension is most measurable and most consequential. But the ambition is larger than reading and larger than school. We are building a standardised, longitudinal record of human understanding, designed to grow across life stages and across borders.

Not to own it. To make it usable: by a parent deciding what their child needs next, by a school finding where understanding breaks, by a system that can finally see comprehension instead of guessing at it. Infrastructure, held responsibly, for better decisions at every level.

How we work

A research company that happens to ship products.

Most companies in this space are products that wish they had research behind them. We are the other way around. The measurement comes first, and it has to be rigorous enough that we would stake a finding on it, because we do. Everything we build, the diagnostic, the libraries, the kits, exists to either gather that measurement or act on what it reveals.

This is a slower way to build. It is also the only way the data ends up worth anything.

The team

A small group, deliberately.

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.Margaret Mead

Infrastructure does not need a crowd to build. It needs a few people who agree on what matters and hold a high bar. These are the people building Agnira.

Key Team Members

Anu Ashok

Co-Founder & CEO

Anu is the architect of ARIA and of the measurement thinking at the centre of Agnira. He brings close to two decades across the full arc of building products, from conceptualisation and prototyping to development, well beyond the web, and across education. His third venture, an education company co-founded with Madhumitha, was acquired by a listed Indian software firm. He formerly served as Chief Content Officer at the Foundation for Ed-Equity, where, with Madhumitha, he co-created the only parallel curriculum of its kind in India. Agnira Research Labs is his fourth venture, again co-founded with Madhumitha, followed by a publishing firm as the fifth, both built around research data and a problem-solving focus. He leads strategy, product architecture, and the science.

Madhumitha Anavaratham

Co-Founder & COO

Madhumitha turns ideas into things that actually reach children. She has co-founded ventures across education and publishing, served as Chief Product Officer at the Foundation for Ed-Equity, and co-created India's only parallel curriculum with Anu. She is the author of several children's books built around early-years pedagogy, and she runs Agnira's publishing work, with a low tolerance for anything that does not ship.

Between them, Anu and Madhumitha have worked at the level of policy and practice: shaping recommendations, making knowledge and context more accessible, and building products and processes measured by their impact. Their current focus is putting data infrastructure and AI to work in places those tools have barely reached, on products that help people think for themselves and grow into a more confident, self-directed generation of thinkers and makers.

Rajesh Madhavan

Chief Editor & Head of Content

Rajesh sets the editorial direction and holds the standard for everything Agnira publishes, carrying each title and report from first concept through to the finished page.

Cliff Bhatt

Literary Curator & Content Creator

Cliff writes and curates the reading material at the heart of the programmes, choosing and shaping the books that genuinely move young readers forward.

Hema Asnani

Head of Creatives

Hema leads the creative direction across Minerva and the publishing work. If something carries the Agnira name and a point of view, her hand is on it.

Vijay Gohil

Coordinator of Creatives

Vijay keeps the creative work organised and moving, the dependable hand that carries projects from first idea to finished piece without anything slipping.

Sahil Miyawada

Assistant, Creatives

Sahil supports the creative team day to day, keeping workflows steady and the small things handled so the work stays on track.

Joel David

Head of Operations

Joel runs the operational backbone, turning a research instrument into something that arrives on time, in every school Agnira works with.

Tejal Vasavada

Sales & Marketing

Tejal opens new schools and institutions and builds the relationships, and the visibility, that bring cognitive measurement to more students.

Richa Modi

HR Lead

Richa builds the team and the culture behind it, from finding the right people to keeping the bar high once they are here.

Bhavna Bhavsar

Administrative Lead

Bhavna keeps the front of house and the day-to-day running smoothly, holding the organisation together with steadiness and warmth.

The name

Agnira

A Sanskrit-rooted word meaning that which possesses fire, the force that moves forward, illuminates, and leads. It draws from Agni, the first word of the Rig Veda, the oldest text in human civilisation.

The name is a first principle. Fire is the precondition for everything else, and cognition holds the same place in our worldview. Before financial literacy, before professional skill, before any decision a person makes, there is a process of understanding. It either works or it does not, and everything downstream inherits the result. Agnira works at that layer.

We measure how people think.

If that sentence interests you, as a school, a researcher, a data partner, or an investor, we would like to hear from you.

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