Alakh Pandey is an Indian physics teacher and entrepreneur from Prayagraj who co-founded PhysicsWallah (PW) with Prateek Maheshwari. He is PW's whole-time director and CEO; the company listed on the NSE and BSE on 18 November 2025.

What is Alakh Pandey's net worth in 2026?

The Hurun Global Rich List 2026 put his wealth at about US$1.7 billion as of 15 January 2026, and Forbes listed him at US$1.0 billion as of 10 March 2026. Almost all of it is his stake in PhysicsWallah, so it moves with the share price.

How did Alakh Pandey start PhysicsWallah?

After leaving engineering college and teaching at an Allahabad coaching institute for about Rs 5,000 a month, he started a YouTube physics channel that took shape around 2016. In June 2020 he and Prateek Maheshwari incorporated PhysicsWallah and launched an app with a Rs 999 course, funded by his YouTube earnings.

Where is Alakh Pandey from and what is his education?

He grew up in Prayagraj (Allahabad), Uttar Pradesh, and studied at Bishop Johnson School & College there. He joined a mechanical engineering degree at HBTI Kanpur but left in his third year.

When was Alakh Pandey born?

PhysicsWallah's IPO prospectus gives his date of birth as 23 March 1992. Some media profiles and Wikidata give 2 October 1991.

What was the PhysicsWallah teachers controversy?

In early 2023 several star teachers left PW to start their own channel. A PW teacher claimed they had been offered Rs 5 crore each to join rival Adda247; the teachers denied it, PW did not confirm the claim, and no lawsuit over it was reported.

Was PhysicsWallah fined by the CCPA?

Yes. By an order dated 1 June 2026 the Central Consumer Protection Authority fined PhysicsWallah Ltd Rs 5 lakh for dark patterns, including a pre-ticked Rs 10 donation at checkout. The government later said PW paid the penalty and stopped the practice.

Who is Alakh Pandey's wife?

Alakh Pandey married Shivani Dubey in February 2023.

Alakh Pandey: PhysicsWallah Founder's Biography

Key facts
Born	23 March 1992, according to PhysicsWallah’s IPO prospectus (some profiles give 2 October 1991) [1] [29]
Hometown	Prayagraj (Allahabad), Uttar Pradesh [29] [17]
Education	Bishop Johnson School & College, Prayagraj; left a B.Tech in mechanical engineering at HBTI Kanpur in the third year [1] [17] [28]
Family	Wife Shivani Dubey (married February 2023); elder sister Aditi [57] [18]
Company	Co-founder, whole-time director and CEO, PhysicsWallah Ltd (PW), listed on NSE and BSE since 18 November 2025 [1] [45]
Wealth	About US$1.7 billion (Hurun Global Rich List 2026, March 2026); US$1.0 billion (Forbes World’s Billionaires 2026, as of 10 March 2026) [13] [14]
Known for	Turning a one-room YouTube physics channel into India’s first listed edtech company, while keeping most courses priced at a few thousand rupees

In June 2020, a few weeks into India’s first Covid lockdown, a 28-year-old physics teacher from Prayagraj launched an app. His YouTube channel already had millions of followers, and he had promised them a full course for the JEE and NEET exams for less than Rs 1,000. The first live class went out, and the app collapsed under the load. It crashed the next day too, and the day after. “The app failed not just on the first day, but second, third, and so on,” Alakh Pandey said later [23]. “I was shattered… I thought they would feel cheated” [21].

They did not. The students stayed, the servers were fixed, and the batch filled up. Two years later that app’s company, PhysicsWallah, became India’s 101st unicorn, valued at US$1.1 billion with its first outside money, and was profitable at the time [20]. Three and a half years after that, on 18 November 2025, it listed on the stock exchanges, a first for an Indian edtech unicorn [24], and its two founders became billionaires on paper [45] [46].

This is the story of how a boy whose family sold their house to pay for school became a self-made billionaire before 35, the bets that worked and the ones that did not, the teachers who walked out, the regulator who fined his company, and what the journey teaches.

Where it began

A house sold in pieces

Alakh Pandey grew up in Prayagraj, the city most Indians still call Allahabad. PhysicsWallah’s red herring prospectus, filed with the stock exchanges in November 2025, records his date of birth as 23 March 1992 [1]; several media profiles and Wikidata give 2 October 1991 instead [29]. We use the filing date, since it is a legal document signed by the company.

The family was not poor to begin with, but it became poor. Pandey has said that part of the family home in Allahabad was sold when he was in Class 3 and the rest when he was in Class 6, and that the family moved to a rented home in a slum area [18] [17]. Forbes Italia, in a September 2026 profile, reported that his father’s two businesses in construction had failed and that medical bills added to the strain [27]. “We had no money for doctors or medicines. Only the Re 1 that government hospitals charged,” he told Outlook Business in 2022 [17].

He tells the story as his mother’s more than his own. “This is actually a story of my mother. Meri amma ki kahani hai,” he said, adding that she took a job in her fifties and borrowed from relatives to keep her children in school [17] [18] [27]. He has an elder sister, Aditi, who also tutored children for money while she studied [18] [27].

Teaching to pay the fees

By Class 8, Pandey was tutoring younger children to bring in money for the household [18] [21]. He studied at Bishop Johnson School & College in Prayagraj, which the prospectus names as the school where he completed his higher secondary education [1]. Reports say he scored 91% in Class 10 and 93.5% in Class 12 [28]. As a teenager he wanted to be an actor and performed in street plays [18].

He did not get into an IIT. He took a seat in mechanical engineering at Harcourt Butler Technical Institute (HBTI, now HBTU) in Kanpur, studying on an education loan [17] [28]. In his third year, around 2014, he quit [24]. “Most students took up jobs in software, marketing, etc. and I thought to myself, ‘What was I doing?’” he recalled. “I was already studying on a loan, so while my mother supported my decision, my sister was aghast” [17].

Back in Allahabad, he took a job at a local coaching institute for about Rs 5,000 a month and taught there for roughly four years on what he has called meagre pay [21] [18] [24].

The first break

A whiteboard, a phone, a rented room

Sources disagree on exactly when Pandey started posting lessons on YouTube. Some profiles say 2014; Pandey himself and several later accounts date the PhysicsWallah channel to 2016 [19] [18] [26]. The safest reading is that he began experimenting around 2014 and the channel as we know it took shape in 2016, shot in a single rented room with a whiteboard and a basic setup [18].

The name was a joke with a point. “Chaiwallah nahi, PhysicsWallah banunga,” he told his family, roughly “I won’t become a tea-seller, I’ll become the physics guy” [17].

Growth was slow. By most accounts the channel had only a few thousand subscribers in its first year or so (figures quoted range from 4,000 to about 50,000 by 2017) [21] [22]. What set it apart was the style: long, unhurried lectures in Hindi and Hinglish, jokes, scolding, and an older-brother warmth aimed at students in small towns who could not afford Kota coaching fees. By 2019 the channel had about 2 million subscribers [21].

Saying no to big cheques

As the channel grew, coaching institutes and edtech companies came calling. Pandey has said the offers ranged from Rs 500 for a 30-second video to, at the top, about Rs 75 crore for a stake in PhysicsWallah or Rs 40 crore a year as salary. He did not name the bidders [19]. Later reports describe a Rs 75 crore offer from “an edtech unicorn” to make him teach exclusively on its platform [24]; some outlets attribute the Rs 40 crore offer to Unacademy, but we found no primary source confirming who made it. He turned them all down. “Not a single call I received was about student welfare or how these videos can be taken to more students,” he said in 2022 [19].

The co-founder

The person who turned a YouTube teacher into a company was Prateek Maheshwari, an IIT-BHU mechanical engineer and former Caterpillar employee who had already built PenPencil, a software tool for coaching institutes [1] [22]. In SEBI filings he appears as Prateek Boob; the press usually uses Maheshwari [42] [32]. Accounts differ on when they met: Business Standard says they were introduced in August 2018, while other reports say he joined in 2019 or 2020 [19] [22] [26]. “After a few meetings, I realised Prateek and I shared great synergies,” Pandey said [22]. The division of labour stuck: Pandey runs teaching and content; Maheshwari ran product, technology and business [19].

PhysicsWallah Private Limited was incorporated in Prayagraj on 6 June 2020 [1]. The app was paid for, Pandey has said, out of roughly Rs 15 lakh of YouTube earnings, with no outside money [22]. Its first big course, the Lakshya batch, was priced at Rs 999 [22]. When the lockdown shut every classroom in India, PW was there with a known face and a price students could pay. The app crashed for days, then took off: it crossed 3 lakh downloads in its first week [22].

Building the empire

Profitable from day one

For two years PW grew on its own cash. Filings with the Registrar of Companies, reported by Business Standard, show FY21 revenue of Rs 24.5 crore and a profit of Rs 6.9 crore [19]. In FY22 revenue jumped to about Rs 233 crore with a profit of about Rs 98 crore [31].

That profitability became PW’s calling card at a moment when India’s edtech sector was burning money. On 7 June 2022 PW raised its first outside capital, US$100 million from WestBridge Capital and GSV Ventures, at a US$1.1 billion valuation. It was India’s 101st unicorn and was widely described as the first profitable edtech start-up to get there [20]. It had about 1,900 employees then, including 500 teachers [20].

Pandey’s view of the industry he was joining was blunt: “To sell a product worth Rs 100 for thousands of rupees and then calling it costing or cash burn is not sound business,” he said that month [19]. The contrast with the fall of BYJU’S, whose founder’s story we told in our Byju Raveendran profile, would become the frame for every story about PW.

Going offline

PW’s most important bet after the app was counter-intuitive for an internet company: physical classrooms. The first PW Vidyapeeth centre opened in Kota in 2022 [31]. By January 2024 there were 75 Vidyapeeth centres in 49 cities and 30 smaller “Pathshala” units [31]. By the end of FY26 the company reported 353 offline and hybrid centres across India and the UAE, with about 4.7 lakh offline enrolments [43].

Offline fees are higher than online ones, and the centres need rent and teachers. But they gave PW a second engine, and by Q1 FY27 offline revenue (Rs 490 crore) was close to online revenue (Rs 549 crore) [39].

A buying spree

Between 2022 and 2024 PW bought or invested in about ten companies [30] [31]. The main ones:

PrepOnline and Altis Vortex (October 2022), for government-job exam preparation [31].
iNeuron (FY23), a tech-skilling platform. Reports at the time put the deal value at up to Rs 250 crore; PW’s prospectus shows it paid about Rs 13.7 crore for iNeuron shares in FY23 [1]. It did not work out (see setbacks).
Knowledge Planet (FY23), a Dubai test-prep company, which took PW into the Gulf [1] [31].
Utkarsh Classes (from February 2023), a Jodhpur-based coaching brand, bought in tranches; PW raised its stake to 75.5% in December 2025 [40].
Xylem Learning (2023), a Kerala coaching company, PW’s entry into South India; its stake reached 77.27% in December 2025 in a Rs 123 crore deal [41].

The second round and the IPO road

In September 2024 PW raised US$210 million in a round led by Hornbill Capital, with Lightspeed, GSV and WestBridge, at a US$2.8 billion valuation [30]. Around the same time each founder sold some shares to investors [32].

Revenue kept compounding, but the profits did not. PW’s restated accounts in the prospectus show:

Year	Revenue from operations	Net profit / (loss)
FY23	Rs 744 crore	(Rs 84 crore)
FY24	Rs 1,941 crore	(Rs 1,131 crore)
FY25	Rs 2,887 crore	(Rs 243 crore)
FY26	about Rs 3,900 crore	(about Rs 24 crore)

Sources: PW’s red herring prospectus and abridged prospectus for FY23-FY25 [1] [2]; company results as reported by YourStory for FY26 [43]. FY23 had first been reported as a small profit, before restatement [33]. Much of the FY24 loss was a non-cash charge on the fair value of preference shares held by investors; excluding it, the loss was about Rs 375 crore [38].

PW filed its draft IPO papers confidentially in March 2025 [44], and the final prospectus, dated 4 November 2025, set out a Rs 3,480 crore issue: Rs 3,100 crore of new shares and Rs 380 crore sold by the two founders, Rs 190 crore each [1] [2]. The price band was Rs 103-109 per share, valuing the company at about Rs 31,170 crore at the top [26]. The issue was subscribed about 1.9 times, with strong institutional demand and lukewarm retail interest [45].

On listing day, 18 November 2025, PW opened at Rs 145 on the NSE, 33% above the issue price, and closed the day at Rs 155.20, a market value of about Rs 44,382 crore [45] [46]. Before the IPO, Pandey and Maheshwari each held 40.31% of the company [1]; after selling in the offer, each still held about 103 crore shares [46].

“I hold a large equity stake, so I’m committed to running it for life,” Pandey said at the time [25].

The founder’s pay

For a founder worth thousands of crores on paper, Pandey’s salary is modest. The prospectus shows FY25 remuneration of about Rs 3.2 crore for him and about Rs 1.35 crore for Maheshwari; the company’s chief operating officer earned more than either [42] [32]. Pandey’s pay had been Rs 9.6 crore in FY22 and Rs 4.6 crore in FY23 [33].

After the listing

The first year as a listed company was a ride. Its first two quarterly results after listing showed profits: Rs 70 crore in Q2 FY26 and Rs 102 crore in Q3 FY26 [34] [3]. Then the share price fell sharply when the post-IPO lock-in on pre-IPO shareholders ended, dropping to about Rs 89 in late February 2026, below the Rs 109 issue price [47]. It later recovered, trading around Rs 137 in mid-September 2026 [48].

For FY26 as a whole, PW reported revenue of about Rs 3,900 crore, up 35%, and a near-breakeven net loss of about Rs 24 crore, with 53.4 lakh paid users [43]. In Q1 FY27 (April-June 2026) revenue rose 24% to Rs 1,054 crore and the net loss narrowed to about Rs 88 crore [39]. Results for July-September 2026 had not been published as of this writing.

In September 2026 Pandey announced that he would spend the next two years based in South India to build PW there. “For the next 24 months, my life will be dedicated to students in South India, and I will be stationed here,” he said [62].

How the wealth is held

Almost all of Pandey’s wealth is his shareholding in PhysicsWallah Ltd, so it rises and falls with the share price. Rich-list estimates have moved accordingly:

Hurun India Rich List 2025 (October 2025, before the IPO): Rs 14,510 crore, up 223% in a year, which put him ahead of Shah Rukh Khan on that list [50].
Hurun Global Rich List 2026 (March 2026, wealth as of 15 January 2026): US$1.7 billion, the same as Maheshwari [13].
Forbes World’s Billionaires 2026: US$1.0 billion as of 10 March 2026, after the share price fall, making him a new entrant to the list [14] [29].

We could not find a published individual figure for him in the M3M Hurun India Rich List 2026, so we do not give one.

The setbacks and failures

The app that crashed

The 2020 launch nearly broke the company before it began. PW’s servers could not handle the first rush of students; Pandey has said he feared his audience would think they had been cheated [21] [23]. The fix took days. The lesson he took from it, he has said, was that trust built on YouTube would buy him time, but not much.

iNeuron: an acquisition that did not work

PW bought iNeuron to move into tech-skilling with a “Job Assurance” programme that promised jobs after courses. In its prospectus PW admitted that “we did not achieve the expected synergies”, because iNeuron’s placement partners could not line up enough recruiters, and enrolments fell short [1]. The company impaired the investment; the prospectus records an impairment of about Rs 69 crore of PW’s investment in iNeuron in FY24, and states that iNeuron had no active business operations or employees and continued only through legacy course content [1]. iNeuron’s auditor also flagged that some of its share allotments before the acquisition had not followed Companies Act rules, which iNeuron has moved to fix [1]. In FY25 PW also wrote down investments in PenPencil and PrepOnline [1].

The FY24 loss

FY24 was the year PW stopped being a profitable edtech company. Revenue rose about 2.6 times, but the company reported a loss of Rs 1,131 crore, driven by a large non-cash accounting charge, aggressive offline expansion and higher staff costs [38] [1]. In its prospectus PW also disclosed that its auditors had qualified their FY23 report on internal financial controls [1].

Teachers who leave

PW sells its teachers as much as its courses, and losing them hurts. Faculty attrition, according to figures from PW’s IPO filings reported by Inc42, rose from 18% in FY23 to about 40% in FY24, before falling to roughly 26-27% in FY25 [35]. In November 2023 PW let go of about 120 employees after performance reviews, saying it was not cost-cutting and that it planned to hire more than 1,000 people [53]. The biggest exit, in 2023, is covered under controversies below.

A shaken Kota

In February 2023 a video showed a PW staff member at the Kota centre pushing a student. PW fired the centre manager “with immediate effect” [37]; its prospectus later confirmed a staff member was terminated over the incident [1].

Controversies and allegations

The 2023 teacher exodus and the “Rs 5 crore” claim

Allegation: In early 2023 several of PW’s best-known teachers, among them Tarun Kumar, Manish Dubey and Sarvesh Dixit, left the company and on 3 March 2023 launched their own channel. A PW chemistry teacher, Pankaj Sijairya, claimed in a video that they had each been offered Rs 5 crore to move to the rival platform Adda247; PW’s chief strategy officer said Adda247 had offered teachers four to five times their salaries [51] [36].

Response: The departing teachers, some in tears on camera, called the bribe claim baseless and said PW’s culture and its affordable-education focus had changed. They also accused PW of filing YouTube copyright strikes against their new channel [51]. PW neither confirmed nor denied the bribe claim, saying: “We do not want distractions to impede our students’ preparations” [52]. Adda247 did not comment publicly [36].

Status: No lawsuit over the bribe claim was reported. The dispute has been dormant since 2023.

Employee dismissal complaints before the IPO (2025)

Allegation: In the months before the IPO, former teachers and staff told MediaNama and other outlets that PW had pushed them into “mutual separation”, paid less notice money than their contracts promised, and in some cases paid salaries late. One former employee filed dozens of complaints, including on SEBI’s SCORES portal and with the labour department. Separate whistleblower complaints in September 2025 alleged that PW misrepresented student results and used “artificial viral marketing” [54] [35] [1].

Response: PW disclosed these complaints in its prospectus and said it had responded to and denied them [1]. It declined to comment on individual cases to the press [35].

Status: No regulatory finding against PW on these complaints has been reported as of 3 November 2026.

The CCPA “dark patterns” penalty (2026)

Allegation: The Central Consumer Protection Authority (CCPA), acting on its own, found that PW’s checkout pre-selected a Rs 10 donation to its PW Foundation (“basket sneaking”), used emotional messages to discourage users from removing it (“confirm shaming”), and required phone numbers and email addresses before giving access to “free” courses (“forced action”). Reports on the order said about 21 lakh users made such donations, totalling about Rs 2.5 crore, between February 2024 and December 2025 [4] [15].

Response: PW argued the donation was transparent and voluntary, that most users unticked it, and that the money was audited and used for charity. It removed the pre-ticked box on 24 December 2025. The CCPA rejected its arguments [15].

What happened next:

By an order dated 1 June 2026 the CCPA fined PhysicsWallah Ltd Rs 5 lakh [4].
In August 2026 the government told the Rajya Sabha that PW had deposited the penalty and discontinued the practice [12].

Status: Closed; penalty paid.

Legal cases disclosed in the IPO prospectus

Allegation: PW’s prospectus listed pending cases against the company, including four criminal matters (among them an FIR in Patna lodged on a complaint by rival coaching chain FIITJEE alleging cheating and theft by certain PW teachers), a civil suit by FIITJEE over alleged misuse of its student data and material, about 21 consumer complaints mostly over fee refunds, tax disputes, and an arbitration claim of about SGD 12.67 million (about Rs 86 crore) by the former owners of Knowledge Planet, who allege PW misrepresented its valuation when granting them stock options [1].

Response: PW said it was contesting the matters; the FIITJEE civil suit had been referred to mediation, and PW had replied to the arbitration notice [1]. The prospectus disclosed no criminal, regulatory or civil proceedings against Pandey or Maheshwari personally [1].

Status: Pending as of the prospectus date. We found no reported final outcome as of 3 November 2026.

PW and Pandey in court as plaintiffs

Allegation: PW and Pandey have themselves gone to the Delhi High Court against critics. In December 2024 the court temporarily barred rival Scholars Den from advertising PW as “sasta wallah” (the cheap one) [8]; the case was later sent to mediation [9]. In January 2026 it ordered a former PW employee who runs a rival channel to take down posts calling PW “ScamWallah”; PW is seeking Rs 2 crore in damages [6] [10]. In August 2026 the court granted Pandey interim protection of his personality rights against impersonating and vulgar content [7].

Response: The former employee defended his posts as fair comment and challenged the court’s jurisdiction; during the hearing the judge questioned PW’s claim that its fees were affordable [10]. In the personality-rights case, the court said such suits cannot be used to stifle satire and parody [11].

Status: Both the ScamWallah and personality-rights cases were pending in the Delhi High Court as of 3 November 2026.

Remarks by PW teachers (2026)

Allegation: In March 2026 a clip showed a PW faculty member using a casteist slur during a lecture [55].

Response: PW suspended the teacher, citing “zero tolerance”, and he apologised publicly [55].

Status: Closed. No remark of this kind has been attributed to Pandey himself.

Not a controversy, but a fight: NEET 2024

In June 2024 Pandey went to the Supreme Court himself, challenging grace marks awarded to about 1,500 NEET-UG candidates as arbitrary (Alakh Pandey v. National Testing Agency) [5]. On 13 June 2024 the court accepted the Centre’s plan to cancel those 1,563 candidates’ scorecards and offer a re-test, and disposed of his petition [16]. When NEET-UG 2026 was cancelled over a suspected paper leak, he again criticised the testing agency publicly: “Even schools manage exams better” [56].

Giving back

Pandey’s best-known contribution is also his business model: a vast amount of free teaching on YouTube, across dozens of channels, which millions of students use without paying [26]. He has said his mother still checks that he keeps teaching free there [17].

Fee waivers: In February 2024 PW said it had waived fees for about 51,000 students from poor families for 2023-24 under a “Right to Education” programme, a commitment it valued at over Rs 17 crore [58].
Scholarships: PW runs an annual National Scholarship-cum-Admission Test (PWNSAT), offering fee waivers of up to 100% [59].
Mass wedding: In February 2023, the same month he married, he funded a mass wedding for about 300 couples in Prayagraj [57].
Personal donations in 2026: After receiving the Uttar Pradesh Gaurav Samman from Union Home Minister Amit Shah in January 2026 [60], he announced donations including Rs 33 lakh to the Nagpur football NGO Slum Soccer; these figures come from press releases issued on his behalf [61].
PW Foundation: PW routes its corporate social responsibility spending through the not-for-profit PW Foundation [1]. The donation box on PW’s checkout page for this foundation is what the CCPA penalised in 2026 (see above).

On money itself he has said: “I do not think anyone ever needs more than Rs 10 crore to live a lifetime” [17].

Succession and the road ahead

At 34, Pandey is not planning succession; he is planning the next decade. He is co-founder, whole-time director and CEO; Maheshwari is a whole-time director; and the board is chaired by an independent director, Deepak Amitabh [1]. The promoter group’s holding was about 72% after the IPO [49]. Pandey has said he does not want family in the business: “I do not have any relatives working in PW. Why should my children?” [17]

His story has already been dramatised twice: the Amazon miniTV series Physics Wallah (2022) and the Netflix-TVF series Hello Bachhon (2026), in which Vineet Kumar Singh plays him [63] [64].

What their journey teaches

Price for the customer you have, not the one you wish you had. PW’s early courses cost a few hundred to a few thousand rupees, at a time when rivals charged many times more [19]. That price let it win students in towns the big brands ignored.

Profit buys freedom. Because PW was profitable when it raised its first round, Pandey and Maheshwari kept about 80% of the company until the IPO [1]. Many edtech founders who chased growth first ended up with small stakes or none.

A founder-brand is an asset and a single point of failure. PW’s audience followed Alakh Pandey’s face. The same pull worked for star teachers who left and took students with them. PW’s answer has been to build a deeper bench and more offline centres.

Admit failed bets in writing. PW’s prospectus states plainly that iNeuron did not deliver [1]. Investors trust a company more when it can say where it went wrong.

Small design choices can become regulatory problems. A pre-ticked Rs 10 donation box, possibly meant well, ended in a CCPA penalty and headlines about “dark patterns” [4]. Growth teams need someone asking whether each nudge treats customers fairly.

Hardship can be fuel, not just a backstory. “If my father was a crorepati or my mother had no sufferings, I do not think I would be this resolute,” Pandey has said [17]. Many founders have hard childhoods; what stands out is how directly his shaped his pricing and his pitch.

For more founder stories, read our profiles of Nithin Kamath, who built Zerodha profitably without venture money, and Ritesh Agarwal, and browse market explainers on CapitalVia Insights.

A profile for general reading, based on public records and reporting as of 3 November 2026. Not investment, tax or legal advice.