Sonya Hooja co-founded Imarticus Learning to fix a skills gap, and it just bought a Singapore institute for ₹800 crore

In the last week of July 2026, a Mumbai company most Indians have never heard of bought a college in Singapore for a reported 800 crore rupees. The buyer was Imarticus Learning, whose revenue for the whole of FY25 was 205 crore rupees. Read those two numbers next to each other and you understand why the deal made the trade press twice over.

Imarticus was founded in 2012 by Nikhil Barshikar and Sonya Hooja. He is the chief executive and the public face. She is the co-founder who has run the operating side of the business for thirteen years, first as chief operating officer and now as president, and she is a lot less famous than she should be for what has actually been built here.

The context is what makes it interesting. India’s edtech decade produced enormous, well-funded, heavily advertised companies, and then it produced their remains. Byju’s. Unacademy’s retreat. Vedantu’s cuts. Lido, gone. Through all of it Imarticus stayed small, dull and profitable, running vocational programmes in investment banking and analytics for people who wanted a job in six months. It has been profitable for the better part of eight years. It is now acquiring companies and preparing to file for a public listing.

Early life and what the public record actually shows

Sonya Hooja has kept her private life private, and there is no verified public record of her birth year, her hometown or her family. Plenty of profile-farm websites will supply all three. They are guessing, and this piece will not repeat guesses as fact.

What is documented is where she was educated and where she worked, and in her case that is genuinely the story, because the company she built is a direct product of both.

Education

Hooja did her undergraduate degree at Rutgers University in the United States, in economics and information technology. That pairing is worth noting. It is finance and systems in the same person, which is precisely the combination that mid-level financial-services jobs demand and that Indian degree programmes have historically failed to produce.

She followed it with an MBA at INSEAD, in the 2009 to 2010 cohort. Look at that date. She went back to business school in the year immediately after the global financial crisis, having watched from inside what the crisis did to banks and to the people who worked in them.

Lehman Brothers, Accenture, and the education that came from watching a bank die

Before INSEAD, Hooja spent roughly a decade in consulting and financial services. She was a business analyst at Lehman Brothers. She was a project manager at ACS. She was a senior analyst and consultant at Accenture, and just before starting up she was in Accenture’s Singapore office working on strategy. Her project experience runs across financial services, education, tourism, the public sector and pharma, which is a wider spread than most operators accumulate.

The Lehman line is the one that matters. Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy in September 2008, the largest in American history, and its collapse detonated the global financial crisis. Her co-founder Nikhil Barshikar was also a Lehman person, later at Nomura Securities India, with a finance degree from Rutgers and a joint MBA from Columbia and London Business School.

Two people who had seen the inside of a bank in the moment it stopped existing went on to build a company that trains people for jobs in banks. That is not irony. Living through 2008 taught both of them something specific about how financial institutions hire, what they actually need on a trading or operations floor, and how far that is from what a fresh commerce graduate in India shows up knowing.

Why she started Imarticus Learning

Imarticus opened in Mumbai in 2012 as a training institute for investment banking operations. Not a marketplace. Not an app. A place where you learned to do a specific job that a specific employer was hiring for.

The problem it targeted is the oldest one in Indian professional life. Every year India produces a very large number of graduates who are technically qualified and practically unemployable, because a degree certifies that you sat through a syllabus rather than that you can do the work. Banks and analytics firms were hiring, and were spending months retraining new joiners in the basics.

Hooja has described the founding goal in plain language: to help people become genuinely job-ready and confident about their careers. It sounds modest next to the language Indian edtech was using at the time about reinventing learning for a billion people. Modest turned out to be the better bet.

The design of the business followed from the goal. Programmes are built around what a hiring manager wants, taught in cohorts, with placement as the measured outcome. In April 2026 the company said it had run its largest placement cycle to date, more than 4,500 careers launched in a single year across finance, data science and AI. That is a company figure, so treat it as the company’s own claim rather than an audited number, but it tells you what the business optimises for. Nobody reports placement counts unless placement is the product.

The early struggle: building slowly while everyone else raised billions

The hard part of this story is not a dramatic near-death moment. It is thirteen years of being the least exciting company in the room.

Between 2015 and 2022, Indian edtech was the loudest sector in the country. Capital was abundant, valuations were vertical, and founders were on billboards. Imarticus was selling six-month vocational certificates and worrying about placement rates. It never raised a headline round. Tracxn records roughly 15.7 million dollars across ten rounds and 32 investors, including Caspian and Hero Corp, and some of that is debt rather than equity. Set that against the billions raised by its contemporaries.

Choosing to stay small when money is cheap and everyone around you is scaling is a genuinely difficult decision to hold for a decade. Your best people get recruited by better-funded rivals. Your growth chart looks unimpressive at conferences. What you get in exchange is that when the funding stops, you do not.

And it did stop. The edtech correction from 2022 onward wiped out companies that had been raising at billion-dollar valuations. Imarticus finished FY25 with 205 crore rupees in revenue, up 16 percent from 177 crore in FY24, and doubled its EBITDA in the same year. It has described itself as profitable for seven to eight years, which very few Indian edtech firms of any size can say.

Funding, revenue and the road to an IPO

For FY26 the company has guided to revenue of roughly 300 to 320 crore rupees, which would be its steepest jump yet. The acquisitions are how it intends to get there.

The first was MyCaptain, a Bengaluru edtech aimed at younger learners, bought in May 2025 for about 50 crore rupees in a cash and stock deal. The second is far larger. In late July 2026, Imarticus acquired BELLS Institute of Higher Learning in Singapore for a reported 800 crore rupees, its first international acquisition. BELLS brings seven training centres in Singapore, a claimed alumni network of more than 1.5 lakh, and relationships with the Singapore government and SkillsFuture Singapore, the national skilling programme. Imarticus says the combined organisation will have more than 1,100 employees across 25-plus offices in India and Singapore, and that it has reached more than a million learners overall. The stated plan includes a BELLS School of AI for working professionals and enterprise teams.

There is a neat circularity in the geography. Hooja was working in Accenture’s Singapore office in the months before she co-founded Imarticus. Fourteen years later, Singapore becomes the company’s regional base for Southeast Asia.

The listing is the other half of the plan. Reported IPO sizes vary, which is normal for a deal that has not yet been filed. Inc42 has reported a roughly 750 crore rupee issue split between a 500 crore secondary sale and a 250 crore primary raise; other coverage has described an issue closer to 1,000 crore rupees. Company statements have pointed to a draft red herring prospectus with SEBI in the coming months. Until a DRHP is actually filed, every one of those numbers is provisional.

Sonya Hooja’s net worth and what she owns

There is no verified public net-worth figure for Sonya Hooja, and any number you find attached to her name online has been invented for traffic. Imarticus is a private company. It has never disclosed a valuation, and it has not filed the offer document that would eventually reveal a share price and a shareholding pattern.

What can be said is structural. Imarticus raised very little outside capital by Indian startup standards, which means the founders were never diluted the way a serially venture-funded founder is. In a company that has raised roughly 15 million dollars in fourteen years and generated its own profits for most of them, founder ownership is usually substantial. That is a statement about the shape of the cap table, not a number.

The IPO is the event that would put a price on it, and reporting indicates a meaningful secondary component, meaning existing shareholders would sell part of their holdings. Who sells, and how much, is not public and will not be until a prospectus says so. Until then, the honest answer to the net-worth question is that nobody outside the company knows, and the people inside it are not telling.

Growth strategy: three choices that made this possible

The first was selling an outcome rather than access to content. Most edtech of that era sold subscriptions to material, which is a business that lives or dies on marketing spend and course completion nobody measures. Imarticus sold a job. When the product is a placement, the company’s incentives are pointed at employers, and employers pay for people who can already do the work.

The second was refusing to fund growth with somebody else’s money. It looked like timidity for a decade. In 2023, when capital vanished from the sector, it looked like the only sensible thing anyone had done.

The third is happening now. A profitable company with a modest balance sheet cannot buy an 800 crore rupee institute out of pocket, which means this phase is being financed against the strength of the business and the listing ahead of it. Imarticus is converting thirteen years of discipline into scale it could not have reached organically, and it is doing so in a market where its funded rivals no longer have the firepower to compete for the same assets. Patience was the strategy right up until the moment aggression became affordable.

What Sonya Hooja’s story teaches Indian founders

The first lesson concerns visibility. Hooja spent thirteen years operating a business that worked while the founders who raised the most money got the magazine covers. Very little of India’s startup coverage, including ours, is calibrated to notice a company compounding at 16 percent with real profits. Founders read that coverage and conclude that a company like hers is failing. It was not failing. It was surviving, which is the harder trick.

The second is about the value of a specific problem. Imarticus did not set out to fix Indian education. It set out to make people employable in investment banking operations, a niche narrow enough to be solved properly. Analytics, fintech, technology and marketing came later, once the model worked. Founders routinely invert this and start with the biggest possible market, which usually means starting with a problem too vague to actually solve.

The third is what an operator is for. Barshikar is the founder-CEO whose name appears in the headlines about the IPO and the acquisitions. Hooja is the co-founder who built and ran the machine those headlines are describing, across thirteen years, 25 offices and a million learners. The Indian ecosystem is far better at celebrating the person who raises the money than the person who makes the thing work. If you are the second kind of founder, this is what that career looks like at scale, and it is worth as much as the other one.

Frequently asked questions about Sonya Hooja and Imarticus Learning

Who is Sonya Hooja?

Sonya Hooja is the co-founder and president of Imarticus Learning, a Mumbai-based professional skilling company she co-founded with Nikhil Barshikar in 2012, where she previously served as chief operating officer. She studied economics and information technology at Rutgers University and took an MBA at INSEAD, and worked at Lehman Brothers, ACS and Accenture, including a strategy role in Accenture’s Singapore office, before starting up.

What is Sonya Hooja’s net worth?

There is no verified public net-worth figure. Imarticus Learning is a private company that has not disclosed a valuation or a shareholding pattern, and Hooja has not appeared on a published rich list. The company has raised comparatively little outside capital, about $15.7 million across ten rounds according to Tracxn, so founder ownership is likely to be substantial, but that is a structural observation rather than a number. Any specific figure online is fabricated.

What does Imarticus Learning do?

It runs job-focused professional programmes for individuals and companies, in investment banking operations, finance, data analytics, technology, fintech, marketing and AI, with placement as the promised outcome. It sells to individual learners and to corporate clients, and it says it has reached more than a million learners since 2012.

Why did Imarticus buy BELLS Institute in Singapore?

The acquisition, reported at about Rs 800 crore in late July 2026, is Imarticus’ first international deal and makes Singapore its regional hub for Southeast Asia. BELLS brings seven training centres, a claimed alumni base of more than 1.5 lakh, and relationships with the Singapore government and SkillsFuture Singapore. Imarticus says the combined business will have over 1,100 employees across more than 25 offices.

Is Imarticus Learning going public?

It has said it intends to. Reported issue sizes range from about Rs 750 crore, split between a Rs 500 crore secondary sale and a Rs 250 crore primary raise, to figures nearer Rs 1,000 crore. A draft red herring prospectus had not been filed with SEBI as of August 2026, so the size, timing and valuation all remain provisional.

Is Imarticus Learning profitable?

The company says it has been profitable for seven to eight years. It reported FY25 revenue of Rs 205 crore, up 16 percent from Rs 177 crore in FY24, with EBITDA doubling in the same period, and has guided to Rs 300 to 320 crore for FY26.

What can founders learn from Imarticus Learning?

Two things. A business that sells a measurable outcome, in this case a job, is far more durable than one selling access to content. And staying profitable while competitors raise enormous rounds looks like timidity for years and then, quite suddenly, looks like the only strategy that survived.