#UNTOLD | Blood, Belief & Borrowed Time: Akshay Chaturvedi & the Cost of Building Leverage Edu

JUNE 26, 2023. 6.30 PM

The money was supposed to land today.

The Series C funding round for Leverage Edu, his study-abroad platform, was almost done.

Akshay Chaturvedi drags out a chair. Its legs shriek across the cafeteria floor. He keeps the phone pinned to his ear.

He doesn’t sit. He has climbed to the fifth floor to take this call alone. Below him, the office is still working. Up here, a fridge hums. His free hand rests on the back of the chair.

The lead investor’s representative tells him they are pulling out.

Say that again.

He presses the phone harder against his ear. Perhaps he misheard. Perhaps this is a condition, another approval, something that can still be fixed. Months of diligence, revisions, conversations that ran past midnight. Other investors brought in around this one commitment.

But you were going to wire today.

His thumb digs into the chair’s edge. He searches for an argument. There must be something he can offer, someone he can speak to. He tries to walk the conversation backwards, to the last moment the money was still coming.

The faces arrive instead.

People he has spoken to about promotions. Bigger roles. What they will build next year. He remembers their expressions when he told them. How closely they listened. How good it felt to have something to give them after all those months of work.

I told them.

His fingers loosen around the chair.

I told them before the money came.

His free hand is shaking. He looks at it for a moment, then pushes it into his pocket.

Five hundred and fifty people.

He tries to think about the investors. His mind keeps dragging him to salaries.

July 1.

He counts the days. Then counts them again.

Five.

He walks to the end of the table, turns and comes back. The phone is hot against his ear. He changes hands.

There must be somebody else.

Another lead. One of the commitments that can hold. He begins pulling the round apart in his head, name by name, trying to work out whom to call first. Every possibility requires him to say the same thing.

The lead has withdrawn.

He hears himself telling the next investor. Then another. He imagines the questions. The calls they will make after his. How long before somebody else withdraws? How long before he is explaining two departures instead of one?

He reaches the chair again and stops.

Beyond the cafeteria door is the way back to his people.

Someone will ask about the round. Someone will bring up the role they discussed. Look at him with the same easy trust they had yesterday.

He tries to picture himself answering. His mouth has gone dry.

What do I tell them?

“That terror of facing people,” he recalls.

A few hours ago, he could have looked them in the eye and talked about next year. Now he cannot get past Saturday.

The chair stands crooked beside the table.

He keeps his hand in his pocket and stays on his feet.

JUNE 26, 2023. 8 PM

“Sorry, Akshay, we can’t do this.”

He has known since 6.30.

It empties his head anyway.

For a second, there is nothing: no argument, no plan, only his own breath. Chaturvedi leans forward, elbows on his knees. He tilts the phone away from his mouth so the man at the other end cannot hear how fast it is coming.

Don’t let him hang up.

Over the last hour, his cofounder Digvijay had been beside him, adviser Karan Khemka on the phone. They had given him one thing to attempt. The senior executive ran a much bigger business. He might not have the full picture. Somewhere in months of negotiation, the why had been lost.

Chaturvedi had to put it back.

First, he had to keep the line alive.

“I understand.”

He hears himself say it. Calm. Reasonable. A stranger’s voice.

Keep going.

He asks for ten minutes. Fifteen.

The executive has other meetings to attend. Chaturvedi looks at the clock. He cannot use these minutes telling the man how frightened he is. He needs something the investor can use.

So he starts with the business. What Leverage can do for the investor’s company. What can change. What can be made to work. He reaches for the next possibility before the last one has finished dying.

You’re a CEO. I’m a CEO. Help me find a way.

Ten minutes pass. Then fifteen.

He keeps talking.

Every time the executive speaks, Chaturvedi listens like a man reading a pulse. A question he can answer. An objection he can remove. Any sign that there is still a way to do this.

His palm has gone damp around the phone.

8.55 pm. Nearly an hour.

The executive has meetings. They could talk again in three or four hours, perhaps. But that would be very late for Chaturvedi.

Why not next week?

Chaturvedi goes still.

Next week.

The dates run through his head. Tonight is Monday. Saturday is July 1. Next week begins after the salaries are due.

Next week is too late.

He has spent almost an hour finding reasons for this man to keep talking. Now he can hear how easily it could end. An agreement to reconnect. A thank-you. Goodbye.

“No time is too late for me,” he says. “My life depends on this.”

He leaves the words there.

Then a time.

2.30 am.

Chaturvedi checks the clock.

He begins preparing three or four pages for the call. Goes back to the beginning of the argument. The same business he has spent months explaining.

What did he not understand?

He changes the order. Cuts a line. Starts again. Tries to stand at the other end of the call and look back at Leverage through the executive’s eyes.

He has bought himself another conversation.

Now he has to find the words that will change its ending.

Almost six hours until 2.30 am.

Five days until July 1.

JUNE 27, 2023. 2.30 AM

Chaturvedi looks through the pages one last time.

Three or four pages. He knows where every argument sits. He has shuffled the order, cut every line he could bear to lose, and tried to guess what the executive will ask before he asks it.

Stop preparing.

The call connects.

He lifts the phone to his ear and starts.

At 8 pm, the man had said no. Chaturvedi had kept him talking for almost an hour. Now he has to make him see what months of negotiation failed to keep in view. Why Leverage matters to his business. What they can build together. Why this investment still makes sense.

He lays out the first argument. Then he stops talking and listens.

Did that land?

His eyes drop to the next point. His mouth is already opening to rush into it.

Wait.

He makes himself hear the answer properly. At 6.30, one sentence sent him spinning straight to July 1. He cannot afford it now. If he drifts into fear while the man is still speaking, he will miss the one sentence that matters.

The conversation goes on.

He circles back through the possibilities. When his mind starts to run, the pages hold it. A point to return to. A line to follow.

Finish this point. Then the next.

The night has narrowed to three things: a voice, a stack of arguments, and a clock.

He listens for movement. A softening. Anything that makes the next call worth making.

And there is one more call. Another investor in the round. A co-lead. Tom.

Chaturvedi dials.

He has to say the sentence again. The lead has withdrawn. And then wait to find out whether this commitment goes down with it.

Please don’t make me start again.

He listens.

Tom will proceed. Even if the original lead does not.

Chaturvedi presses the phone harder against his ear.

He’ll do it.

He runs it back, word by word, in case he has misheard. And Tom will talk to the others.

For hours, every name in the round has been one more conversation Chaturvedi might have to open with bad news. Now someone is offering to make those calls with him.

One commitment can still hold. And someone else will help him hold the others.

Around 4 am, something shifts in his chest. A small thing. A loosening.

I can keep going.

There are still people to reach. Commitments to hold together. He goes back through the names. The round he had been tearing apart in his head, hour after hour, might be built again.

He returns to the calls.

Night thins towards morning. Around 5.30, then 6, he finally gets ready to sleep. He puts the phone within reach of his hand.

His mind goes back to the office. To the people he had pictured stopping him on the way downstairs. The promotions. The bigger roles. He cannot think that far ahead.

First, Saturday.

“Hopefully,” he remembers thinking, “we will be able to pay salaries on first July.”

Four days left.

He looks at the phone one more time before he lies down.

THE OLD LAPTOP, BENGALURU & EARLY DAYS OF LEVERAGE

The heat comes up off the pavement in waves.

Chaturvedi walks through Koramangala with nowhere he particularly wants to go.

He has just left an investor’s office. No cheque. He had scraped together ₹2,500–3,000 for the SpiceJet ticket because an investor wanted to meet him. Keen, they had said. Come over.

So he came.

He had left his job. He was living with his parents in Delhi. He had spent money he could barely spare to fly here and sit in a room where someone would decide whether he was worth backing.

What am I doing?

The question keeps pace with him, step for step.

He heads towards a Dunkin’ Donuts near the old Innov8 office. The sun presses on the back of his neck. Then he feels it: a warm wetness at his nostril.

His nose is bleeding.

It has happened since childhood. Heat brings it on. He knows this. But today, with the meeting still looping in his head, the blood feels like one more thing he cannot hold together.

Look at you.

He had arrived wanting someone to see a founder.

Now he is a man in the sun, bleeding, wondering whether quitting his job was stupidity.

At Dunkin’, he drops into a seat and opens his laptop. It is four or five years old. The fan whirs. A message. From Kashyap Deorah.

Whatever Chaturvedi is doing, the angel investor is willing to put in ₹10 lakh.

He reads it. Then reads it again.

Someone believes him. He had been trying to defend a market, a business model, an ambition. What he needs, sitting before that old laptop with the blood barely dry, is something far simpler.

One person.

He can go back to work with that.

THE NAMES

The rejections do not stop.

Investors question whether study abroad can produce a business big enough to fund. Some hold him up against founders with IIT degrees and consulting careers. If those people cannot make it work, what will he do differently?

He brings numbers. They bring comparisons.

In one meeting, he argues that Leverage is already making ₹4 lakh a month; the business being held up against him had made ₹8 lakh in a year.

The answer still comes back to the same doubt.

How big can this become?

He carries those conversations home. And he keeps them.

Years later, whenever Leverage produces a result he is proud of, his fingers find the names of three investors who once turned him down. He sends them the update before many others receive it.

Seven or eight years of doing that.

See?

“I am somebody who takes things very personally,” he says.

The business has grown. The recipients remain the same.

JUNE 2018. STARBUCKS, CYBERHUB

The meeting is set for 12.15 pm. Chaturvedi arrives at noon.

He has been chasing Karthik Reddy of Blume Ventures for months. Introductions have come through professors, angels and mutual contacts. Each has brought him a step closer to a conversation that still refuses to happen.

Now he is fifteen minutes early. Reddy is already deep in conversation with another founder.

Chaturvedi waits.

12.40.

12.45.

The slot is supposed to end at one. There won’t be time.

He watches the other conversation run on. He has finally reached the meeting, and it is slipping away without him.

At last, Reddy comes over. He apologises. They will have to reschedule. His assistant will find another time.

Chaturvedi can already see what that means. Another email. Another follow-up. Another morning refreshing his inbox for a slot.

He says he will come with him. Reddy has an Uber to catch. Chaturvedi gets in.

A Blume colleague sits in front. Chaturvedi pitches from the back seat, beside Reddy, the city sliding past the glass. Questions come. Comparisons come. He answers, pushes back, tries to make the man see why this company can work.

He has lost the table. He still has the journey.

By the time they reach Saket, Reddy is interested enough to keep talking before his next meeting. They stand in the June heat for another fifteen or twenty minutes.

Reddy likes the business. He likes Chaturvedi.

But Blume is raising its own fund. There is no cheque to write today.

Chaturvedi goes back into the market.

When other commitments begin to come together, he returns. There are people willing to invest now. Will Blume join them? He wants to work with Reddy.

The process begins. During the investment committee discussions, questions arrive that Chaturvedi struggles to answer adequately.

Reddy answers on his behalf. Chaturvedi notices.

The investor he once chased into an Uber is now helping him through the room.

Blume invests.

THE LETTER

Years later, in his office, Chaturvedi looks towards his drawer.

He is searching for something he has kept.

A letter.

He thinks it was on his desk. Perhaps it has gone into the drawer. He keeps looking as he explains why the night of June 2023 frightened him so much.

Reddy had encouraged him to write it, in 2021 or 2022. A letter to himself. In it, he had put down something he was proud of.

During Covid, Leverage had not fired anyone.

Some board members had suggested using the disruption to trim the team. Chaturvedi refused. He had not started the company to build it that way.

In June 2023, there were about 550 people. He had been thinking about their promotions. Talking about what they would do next. The round was almost done. The money felt close enough to begin the conversations.

Then he was standing in a cafeteria, trying to work out whether he could pay them. He remembers what he had written in the letter. What he had been proud of.

We didn’t fire anyone.

Now he was calling investors through the night, trying to protect the next salary date. The investor who had pulled out did invest eventually, Chaturvedi says. The round survived.

But he had heard what could happen in the gap between a promise to send money and the money arriving.

WHO SPENT THE MONEY?

When Chaturvedi looks back at the crisis, he also has to look at what came before it. The money Leverage had raised. The money it had spent.

In 2022, the company raised roughly $22–23 million in its Series B. Capital was available. Hiring was the problem. The team had to grow fast, and finding people was proving harder than finding money.

Chaturvedi threw himself into it. Senior hires came in. Some did not work out. The business scaled on uneven economics. Marketing swallowed cash.

Now, remembering it, he presses a hand to his head. There had been so much money.

We burned so much of it. What were we doing?

He can describe the mood. Companies around him were spending to grow. Funding announcements arrived with valuations, expansion plans and the easy assurance that this was how ambitious businesses were built.

He had looked at some of those founders and seen people to emulate. Then he had followed parts of the same playbook.

“We did not understand cash flow enough,” he says.

He does not let himself pin the blame on others. Leverage made mistakes too. Smaller sums than some of the companies he criticises, perhaps.

The mistake was still a mistake. Sometimes he tells himself to forgive it and move on. Thinking too long about the money they spent can drag him back to a place he does not want to live in.

But moving on means changing what happens to the next rupee.

In Mumbai, board member Deepak Shahdadpuri of DSG Consumer Partners gave him a sentence he could not easily dismiss.

“You always choose growth.”

Chaturvedi heard a description of himself. He also heard what it could do to him.

Shahdadpuri urged him to become a cash-flow entrepreneur rather than remain absorbed in the profit-and-loss statement.

Chaturvedi thought about the meetings. The chasing. The explaining. Having to persuade someone, somewhere, to give him another chance.

How long do I keep doing this?

On June 26, he had needed another man to make time for him at 2.30 am.

He wanted to build a company whose next salary day did not depend on getting that appointment.

WHEN DOES THE MONEY ARRIVE?

A student comes to Leverage to apply to a university. The same student needs a loan, foreign exchange, accommodation, a visa and travel arrangements. The company has already spent money reaching that student. Chaturvedi begins looking more closely at what happens after the application.

Leverage widens the services it provides along that journey. More revenue can come from a relationship it has already built. He wants the company to stay useful to the student through the steps that follow admission.

Then he turns to referrals. Leverage calls itself student-first. He wants to know whether students behave as if that is true.

Do they recommend it?

The share of referral business is tiny. Around 1%, by his account. The team works on the experience. Chaturvedi follows the number as it climbs: 4%, then 11%, then 16%. Eventually, he says, 26%.

Each movement means more students are arriving because another student has sent them. The company can spend less to acquire that business.

Marketing shifts too. Leverage leans harder on affiliates who are paid when the company succeeds. Chaturvedi wants the payment to follow a result.

Further down the chain, smaller agents sending students through larger intermediaries face another problem. They cannot always see what has happened to an application or why a commission has not arrived. Months of work can end with an explanation they have little means of checking.

Leverage builds a dashboard to make the stages visible. The agent can follow the application instead of waiting for somebody else to account for it.

The company introduces a service promise it calls 111: application submission in one day, an offer in one week and commission payment in one month.

Chaturvedi also works to bring cash into the business earlier through paid service packages. The timing matters. A business can keep doing work while waiting months for the money attached to it.

He starts looking for those waits throughout Leverage.

Where have we done the work but not collected?

Where are we paying before we earn?

Which growth can we actually afford?

Earlier, he had looked at how much the company could become. Now he keeps returning to what has reached the bank.

THE SUITCASE

There is one more dependence to reduce.

For years, Leverage has been closely tied to Indian students travelling to a familiar set of destinations. A policy change in one country can travel straight into the company’s numbers.

Chaturvedi begins looking for students elsewhere, and for destinations beyond the usual corridors. Nigeria. Other African markets. Europe.

The questions follow him.

Why those countries? Why spend time there when the business is supposed to be in Britain, America, Canada and Australia?

He keeps travelling. London. One morning, he picks up his bag to catch an 8 am train. He is going to pitch a university.

A mentor staying at the same hotel is leaving in an S-Class Mercedes with an investment banker. They exchange greetings and agree to meet that night.

Chaturvedi takes the train. Around 11 or 11.30 that night, he and his mentor go for a walk.

The conversation turns to bankers. Chaturvedi bristles. He feels some have treated him like a “tier-5 entrepreneur”. He can still recall the dismissals. The lack of interest. The sense of having to prove he deserves the conversation before the conversation can begin.

His mentor has a different story. A banker had refused him six times. On the seventh, when he needed representation for a transaction, the same man stood by him and helped secure a better deal.

Chaturvedi listens.

Six refusals.

He tries to imagine returning after the sixth. Making another call. Asking the same person to work with him. He has been carrying every refusal as a judgment. His mentor is asking him to consider what the relationship might still become.

There will be another day’s work. Another university. Another pitch.

He starts engaging with bankers again. The corridors widen. Students from different markets can travel to different destinations. By the time of the interview, he describes a business operating across 17 emerging markets and more than 12 destinations. He still has to persuade universities. He still has to build local teams.

The map grows through those encounters.

THE NEXT CHEQUE

By 2026, Leverage is preparing for a much larger capital conversation.

The company reportedly posted ₹372 crore in FY26 revenue and ₹9.5 crore in EBITDA. For FY27, it is targeting ₹600 crore in revenue, growth of more than 60%. The ambitions extend to an IPO in 18 months. The international expansion has also reached South America. Leverage confirmed its acquisition of Brazil-based Mundus Agency, reported in July, without disclosing the transaction’s financial terms.

The numbers would once have given him something irresistible to send to the investors who rejected him. They also bring him back to Shahdadpuri’s observation.

“You always choose growth.”

He still wants it. The targets make that clear.

THE NAMES STILL IN HIS PHONE

At Harsh Mariwala’s Bandra home, Chaturvedi sits beside the veteran entrepreneur and makes notes.

Organisational layers. Processes. Difficult conversations. How to make a growing company work when people and responsibilities no longer fit together as easily as they once did. He asks. Writes. Takes the questions back to Leverage.

The young founder who scraped together a flight fare has a much larger business to talk about now. He says he no longer seeks validation the way he once did.

It used to hit him hard. A refusal could send him into hours of doubting himself. Someone else’s success could make his own progress feel small. Now, he says, winning customers matters most to him.

Yet the three investors still get his good news. He has been sending it for years. Part of him still wants them to open the message. Read the result. Remember the founder they turned down.

Asked whether he can finally become his own hero, he does not claim to have arrived.

“I’m not there yet.”

He says he still does not know enough. He is learning. The names are still in his phone. So is the possibility of calling someone who once said no. He has done it before.

At 8 pm, he heard the refusal. At 2.30 am, he was back on the line.