Some years quietly pass by. Others leave a mark.
2025 was firmly the latter at LoEstro Advisors. It was a year of big decisions and bold bets, of founders standing at inflection points, capital finding conviction, and ideas turning into institutions. A year where late nights blurred into early mornings, spreadsheets sat alongside strategy debates, and every mandate came with real stakes and real ambition.
We partnered with businesses navigating moments that truly mattered, raising growth capital, rethinking strategy, entering new chapters, and building for the long term. Along the way, we sharpened our point of view across sectors like education, healthcare, consumer and technology, deepened our advisory playbook, and continued to invest time in decoding what’s next through research, writing, and original perspectives.
But 2025 wasn’t just about transactions and outcomes. It was also about people, inside and outside the firm. Shared wins, tough conversations, moments of doubt, bursts of laughter, and the quiet satisfaction of work done right. From backing young talent through the LoEstro Scholars Program to strengthening the culture that binds us together, this was a year that stretched us, grounded us, and reminded us why we do what we do.
And if there’s one thing this year reinforced, it’s this: the most meaningful work happens when insight meets intent, and when ambition is met with the right partner.
Chapter 1: Staying the Course in a Selective Deal Market
In Frame: NIIT Acquires Coimbatore-Based Tech Skilling Provider IAMNEO
The deal environment in 2025 demanded patience, precision, and perspective. With capital more discerning and timelines stretching across both M&A and fundraising, this was a year where conviction mattered more than volume. Against this backdrop, LoEstro Advisors remained deeply engaged at the sharp end of decision-making, working alongside founders and institutions as they navigated some of their most critical inflection points.
While the year saw fewer closures across the market as a whole, we successfully completed multiple high-quality transactions that reflected the kind of outcomes we prioritize – strategic alignment, long-term value creation, and the right partners at the table. Among these was our advisory on iamneo, supporting the company through a pivotal transaction that reinforced its growth trajectory and strategic positioning. We also advised Bower School of Entrepreneurship on its successful launch and fundraising.
Beyond closed deals, 2025 was a year of deep execution across live mandates. We worked closely with a diverse set of clients across education, healthcare, consumer, and emerging sectors, on early-growth stage fundraising and mergers and acquisitions.
In Frame: Bower School of Entrepreneurship Raises 11.5 Cr in Seed Funding
A key milestone for us was the launch of our sector-agnostic fundraising practice, expanding our investment banking platform beyond traditional strongholds. This new vertical reflects our belief that strong advisory is rooted less in labels and more in fundamentals – business quality, growth ambition, and founder-investor fit. The practice has already seen strong traction, with multiple early and growth-stage companies engaging us to navigate increasingly nuanced capital markets.
As we reflect on the year, what stands out is the depth of trust placed in us. In a cautious market, founders chose partners who could think long-term, move thoughtfully, and stay committed through complexity. That trust is something we value deeply, and it continues to shape how we build our investment banking practice – patiently, credibly, and with conviction.
Chapter 2: Partnering Institutions Through Critical Growth Decisions
Growth is rarely linear. It comes with trade-offs, tough choices, and moments where clarity matters more than speed. In 2025, LoEstro Advisors continued to work alongside leading institutions, private-equity backed players and founder-led platforms as they navigated these moments, precisely helping translate ambition into executable, grounded strategy.
A defining highlight of the year was being recognized as Consultant of the Year at the Education Investor Awards. The recognition reflected not just outcomes, but the way we work, deeply embedded with clients, data-led in approach, and focused on building strategies that hold up under real-world complexity.
Across our consulting engagements, we partnered with established education platforms and fast-scaling institutions on some of their most pressing questions. From rethinking growth pathways and portfolio strategy to addressing pricing architecture, expansion sequencing, and operating model redesign, our work this year was anchored in solving problems that sat at the intersection of vision and viability.
In Frame: LoEstro Advisors Acts as Exclusive Strategic Advisor to India’s Leading K-12 Group
One such engagement involved working closely with a large, multi-city K-12 school network on a no-name basis, helping leadership reassess its expansion roadmap amidst shifting parent expectations and rising cost structures. The mandate required balancing scale with quality, redesigning catchment-level strategy, refining admissions and pricing levers, and aligning academic delivery with long-term brand positioning. The outcome was a sharper, more defensible growth blueprint that leadership could execute with confidence.
We also found ourselves advising clients on increasingly nuanced problem statements:
How do legacy institutions modernize without diluting trust?How do fast-growing platforms preserve outcomes while expanding rapidly?How should operators prioritize capital deployment in uncertain demand cycles?What does “premium” truly mean in a price-sensitive market?
As the year drew to a close, one theme stood out across mandates: clients were no longer looking for generic advice. They wanted partners who could think alongside them, challenge assumptions, and stay close through execution. That trust continues to shape how we build our consulting practice.
Because in a world of complexity, the real value of strategy lies not in the slide, but in the decisions it helps unlock.
Chapter 3: Shaping the Conversation Through Insight and Action
In Frame: LoEstro Partner Payal Jain Revealing the Hyderabad Innovation Report at HES Summit 2025
At LoEstro Advisors, thought leadership is not an add-on; it is a core extension of how we engage with the ecosystem. In 2025, our focus shifted decisively from commentary to practical, operator-first insight, designed to inform decisions, challenge assumptions, and help founders, investors, and institutions act with greater clarity.
Over the year, our work spanned reports, articles, masterclasses, and toolkits, reflecting a belief that insight must travel across formats to truly create impact. Whether through long-form research or hands-on frameworks, the objective remained the same: make complex sectors easier to understand and easier to navigate.
In Frame: Reports Published by LoEstro Advisors in 2025
Flagship Reports and Publications
This year saw the release of multiple high-impact publications across healthcare, education, and innovation:
Hyderabad Innovation Report 2025: An exploration of Hyderabad’s emergence as one of India’s leading startup and innovation hubs, highlighting its strengths across deeptech, lifesciences, defence, AI, and spacetech, alongside the ecosystem enablers, capital flows, and cultural forces driving its growth.Unlocking India’s CDMO Advantage – Drivers, Segments, and Market Playbook: This report examined the global CDMO landscape through the lens of India’s rising strategic relevance, covering de-risking from China, the impact of the BIOSECURE Act, India’s cost and compliance advantages, market segmentation across APIs, formulations, and integrated CDMOs, and growth playbooks for mid-sized players including capability building, M&A, and exits.The India HigherEd Opportunity: A deep dive into India’s rapidly transforming higher education market, mapping key opportunity segments, regulatory and investment considerations, evolving delivery models, and critical success factors for institutions navigating scale, quality, and employability in a 92M+ enrolment future.
Together, these reports reinforced our position at the intersection of capital, policy, and execution.
In Frame: Expert-Led Masterclasses Organized by LoEstro Advisors
Learning Beyond the Page: Masterclasses and Operator Toolkits
Complementing our written work, we conducted multiple masterclasses aimed at founders, school operators, and leadership teams, focused squarely on real-world challenges:
Driving Admissions at the Segment Level by Sumit Handa (Co-Founder and Partner at LoEstro Advisors)Making Learning Real by Vishnu Karthik (Co-Founder of Heritage Xperiential Learning School)Regulatory Framework and Legal Obligations for K-12 Institutions by Ankit Majumdar (Managing Partner at Quillon Partners) and Shriti Shah (Partner at Quillon Partners)Driving Enrolments and Admissions for K-12 Schools by Sumit Handa (Co-Founder and Partner at LoEstro Advisors)Budgeting and Financial Management for K-12 Schools by Rakesh Gupta (Co-Founder and Managing Partner at LoEstro Advisors)
We also released operator-ready toolkits, including MIS frameworks for K-12 schools and budgeting & financial planning templates, enabling institutions to move from strategy to structured execution.
In Frame: Key Themes for Articles Published in 2025
Amplifying Reach Through Articles
Alongside reports and sessions, we published 33 original articles on Medium, spanning education, healthcare, consumer, deeptech, and innovation ecosystems. These pieces extended our thinking into the public domain, sparking discussion and offering timely perspectives on evolving market dynamics.
Across formats and sectors, one theme stood out this year: the ecosystem is hungry for clarity that is grounded, actionable, and honest. That belief will continue to guide how we research, write, teach, and share, ensuring that our thought leadership remains not just insightful but useful.
Chapter 4: Showing Up Where Conversations Are Shaping the Future
In Frame: LoEstro Partners Rakesh and Sumit Leading Workshops at The Chrysalis FUEL Platform
Ideas gain real power when they’re tested in open rooms, where founders, operators, investors, and educators come together to debate what’s changing and what’s next. In 2025, LoEstro Advisors continued to stay close to these conversations, participating actively across forums that shape India’s education, technology, and innovation ecosystem.
A key highlight of the year was our leadership team stepping in as speakers and facilitators at curated, practitioner-led platforms. Rakesh Gupta and Sumit Handa engaged with school leaders and education operators at the Chrysalis FUEL platform, leading focused workshops and discussions around institutional growth, leadership decision-making, and navigating scale in a rapidly evolving education landscape. These sessions reflected our belief in sharing grounded, experience-led perspectives rather than abstract theory.
In Frame: Leading Conferences Where We Marked Our Presence in 2025
Beyond the podium, the year was equally defined by presence. We participated as active ecosystem stakeholders at some of the most influential gatherings across sectors, engaging in dialogue, building relationships, and staying plugged into global and domestic shifts. From the ASU-GSV Summit to the Hyderabad Entrepreneurship Summit and the Matrix Global DeepTech Summit, these forums offered front-row seats to how capital, technology, and entrepreneurship are converging.
Whether as speakers, participants, or collaborators, these moments reinforced the importance of staying close to the ecosystem, not just to observe trends, but to help shape them. For us, showing up is not about visibility alone; it’s about listening deeply, exchanging ideas honestly, and carrying those insights back into the work we do every day with founders and institutions.
And as the ecosystem continues to evolve, we intend to remain firmly in the room – curious, engaged, and contributing with intent.
Chapter 5: Purpose Beyond the Mandate
In Frame: Narmada Valley FC Emerge as Winners of the MP Women’s Premier League
At LoEstro Advisors, our work has always been anchored in the belief that long-term impact goes beyond transactions. Through the LoEstro Scholars Program, we continue to stand by causes that create real opportunity, where talent, when supported early and consistently, can rewrite futures.
Our partnership with Mrida Education and Welfare Society has grown deeper over the years, and this year brought with it a moment that felt truly historic. Mrida’s women’s football team, Narmada Valley FC, were crowned champions of the MP Women’s Premier League, earning qualification to the Indian Women’s League 2, the second tier of women’s football in the country.
In Frame: Team LoEstro Hosting Future Stars From Narmada Valley FC at The Office
Closer to home, some of our most joyful moments this year came when we hosted young champions from Mrida at our office, winners of the Inspired Cup organized by Anantpur Sports Academy. What followed was a day filled with curiosity, laughter, quizzes, office tours, shared meals, and conversations that reminded us why grassroots work matters. (Fun fact: among these future stars, too, CR7 clearly beat Messi as the fan favourite.)
We feel privileged to play a small role in this journey, supporting education and sports training, and opening our doors to young achievers. We stand alongside Priya Nadkarni and her extraordinary team as they continue to redefine what grassroots sports empowerment can look like in India.
Here’s to many more victories, on the field, in classrooms, and in life. We’re proud to be part of this story.
Chapter 6: The People Powering What Comes Next
In Frame: Fresh Faces at LoEstro Advisors in 2025
Growth shows up in numbers. It shows up in mandates closed and milestones crossed. But most meaningfully, it shows up in people.
This year marked a significant milestone in LoEstro Advisors’ ongoing commitment to long-term growth. As our investment banking and consulting practices scaled across fundraising, M&A, and strategy mandates, so did the team behind the work. We welcomed new colleagues across functions and levels, each bringing distinct perspectives, complementary strengths, and a shared hunger to build something meaningful.
Aditya is a qualified chartered accountant by profession. He brings valuable experience in financial due diligence, having worked with EY, where he worked on transactions across manufacturing, pharma, and hospitals, building a strong foundation in transaction advisory.Rudra is an SRCC graduate and began his career in the private markets group at Acuity Knowledge Partners. He later joined the debt investments team at Caspian, where he focused on debt deals across early-growth stage startups in agri-tech, health-tech, and consumer-tech sectors.In Frame: Team LoEstro Delivering a Pre-Placement Talk at ISB
One of the highlights of the year was conducting our first campus placement drive at the Indian School of Business, the #1 business school in the country, opening our doors to young talent eager to learn, question, and grow in a high-intensity advisory environment. It was a step towards institutionalizing talent development early, and a signal of our intent to invest in the next generation of advisors from day one.
In Frame: LoEstro Advisors Expands Presence to Mumbai
The year also saw a physical milestone with the launch of our Mumbai office, expanding our footprint and strengthening our proximity to founders, investors, and ecosystem partners across India’s financial capital. The new office reflects not just scale, but the evolution of the firm into a multi-city platform built for collaboration, speed, and deeper market engagement.
As the business grew, across consulting engagements, capital raise mandates, and M&A advisory, the team grew alongside it. What remained constant was the culture: high ownership, sharp thinking, mutual respect, and a bias for doing the right thing for clients. From late-night debates to shared wins and everyday problem-solving, this was a year where the team truly came into its own.
The faces you’ll see here, new joiners, young leaders, and experienced hands alike, are shaping what LoEstro becomes next. And as we look ahead, one thing is clear: the strength of our work will always be a reflection of the people behind it.
Chapter 7: The Moments Between the Work
In Frame: Diwali Puja at LoEstro Advisors Hyderabad Office
Behind every late night, every intense discussion, and every tough call is a team that knows how to unwind together. This year, life at LoEstro Advisors was as much about shared laughter, small traditions, and quiet rituals as it was about the work itself.
With team members spread across cities, the year involved a lot of movement – frequent flights, quick turnarounds, and regular reunions at our base office in Hyderabad. Airport conversations, late dinners after long days, and spontaneous catch-ups became part of the rhythm, helping us stay closely connected despite the miles.
In Frame: Team Members Out For a Fun Dinner on a Friday Night
Celebrations remained a constant. Birthdays were marked with cakes, laughter, and the familiar comfort of Niloufer, which once again lived up to its reputation as the team’s default favourite. Over time, a handful of go-to food and beverage spots emerged, reliable for team lunches, late-night refuels, and those in-between breaks that often sparked the best conversations.
After office hours, competition took a different form. FIFA 25 became the analysts’ favourite way to unwind, with fiercely contested matches, growing rivalries, and one undisputed dominant force, well known within the team. What started casually quickly turned into a ritual, complete with spectators, banter, and bragging rights.
In Frame: Tombstone Distribution at LoEstro Advisors
One of the quieter but most meaningful moments of the year was finally putting together tombstones for some of our recent deals, but not in the usual way. We skipped the traditional shiny plaques and instead went with simple black cubes. These cubes now sit around the office as understated reminders of the journeys behind them. Each one represents countless calls, spreadsheets, negotiations, pivots, and the occasional “why do we do this to ourselves?” moment. Fees come and go, but these cubes stay, carrying the stories that truly matter.
These moments, big and small, define our culture. A culture where people enjoy working together, celebrate progress, honour the journey behind the outcomes, and find joy even in the busiest stretches. Because while the work matters deeply, it’s the people and the shared experiences that make it all worthwhile.
Here’s to the dinners, the games, the travels, the stories behind the cubes, and everything that makes the journey memorable.
Moving Forward to 2026, With Conviction
As we step into the year ahead, we do so with the confidence that comes from momentum well-earned. The past year sharpened our perspective, expanded our ambition, and reinforced the kind of partner we strive to be: deeply involved, sector-led, and relentlessly focused on outcomes that matter.
The road ahead holds exciting possibilities. We plan to continue widening our footprint across high-growth sectors, deepen our advisory capabilities, and lean further into areas where capital, strategy, and long-term value intersect. From scaling our investment banking platform to building sharper consulting playbooks and advancing original thinking across emerging themes, the next chapter is about building with intent and clarity.
Equally important is the journey within. Investing in our people, strengthening our culture, and extending our commitment beyond business, through initiatives like the LoEstro Scholars Program, will remain central to how we grow. The goal is not just to do more work, but to do meaningful work, with the right partners, in the right way.
With gratitude for the trust of our founders, investors, collaborators, and team, we move forward energized and optimistic. The challenges ahead excite us. The opportunities inspire us. And the conviction to keep raising the bar remains stronger than ever.
Onward. Upward. Always.
LoEstro Advisors is an investment banking firm specializing in sell-side fundraising and M&A advisory, along with a strong consulting arm. Recognized as the #1 financial advisor in education in India, we are the advisor of choice to India’s blue-chip education businesses.
Over the last six years, we have grown to be one of India’s largest (in terms of M&A transactions) homegrown boutique investment banks, with $1.5bn+ worth of combined deals closed across education, healthcare, consumer, and technology sectors.