Ashwa Education
A story of metamorphosis
From Warhorse to Ashwa
It was August 2015,
Founder and CEO, Sidhaanth Dharmadheeran convinced 2 friends to start Warhorse Innovations Pvt Ltd with him. Their goal was to help Indians be better versions of themselves by learning to speak better, think better and know more.
Click to watch
They began their efforts with speak better!
The thesis was, if one could speak well, all outcomes of life would be dramatically better.
Each member of the team a testimonial to that premise.
They even grabbed the headlines in The Hindu's Education Plus.
6 college students with collectively over 1000 awards in speaking and debating.
But as they dived deeper into the education problem!
The whole system was built on outdated foundations.
They had to reimagine not only what people learned but the environment they learned in.
After 2 years of iterative building they launched Project DELTA.
A program to help students master the arts of Public Speaking, Debate and MUN while building the skills of thinking, elocution and analysis.
They were getting noticed!
Industry leaders recognised that education needed changing and fund./amental human skills were the future in the Age Of AI.
Their goal of helping individuals be better versions of themselves by speaking better, thinking better and learning better was resonating with people.
Meanwhile, they deepened their roots in their home city of Chennai!
By building a community of humans who fell back in love with learning.
But all was not well as they marched on...
The journey took many a dramatic turn! They were faced with realities they didn't know existed as inexperienced 21-year-olds starting a company.
Here’s a semi-overwhelmed Sidhaanth sharing the story for the first time with the outside world - clearly he's going through something :P
They were down, but not out!
Sidhaanth buckled down for a year and worked towards drafting a young, exciting new team.
2020 was going to be the breakout year, and it was..
Except it was a pandemic that broke out!
The team found themselves stranded in an unprecedentedly uncertain world.
But even through that, they put their heads down and got to work.
Adapting to the online space, smarter and better and faster than most.
And it was working!
They had kids loving the online gamified learning experience they created in a matter of months.
But Sidhaanth as exhausted.
After the summer of 2021, Sidhaanth took the final call to disband the Warhorse Tribe.
He spent the next 12 months in a cocoon of sorts, processing a journey of 6 years that started at the age of 21. Trying to make sense of himself and his identity with Warhorse.
After unwrapping, unraveling, unpacking, and unlearning, to reimagining and reorganising - Sidhaanth found answers.
He managed to distill all these thoughts and ideas in the context of everything he had learned and understood about running a company - that was trying to change the world. And in the summer of 2022, after a cycle of death, there was one for rebirth.
"As the saying goes - Don't be afraid to start over. This time you're not starting from scratch, you're starting from experience"
