Jalsa Ventures Pvt. Ltd., the parent company behind several of India’s largest education franchise brands, has set out a roadmap to expand its network to more than 2,000 centres across India within two years. The group currently operates through more than 700 outlets and partner locations and expects to reach 1,100 to 1,200 centres by the end of this year.
The stated sequence is specific: 1,100–1,200 centres by the close of 2026, then 2,000 by the end of 2027. That is roughly a tripling of the current footprint inside 24 months, delivered through what the company describes as an asset-light, franchise-led model rather than company-owned rollout.
Supporting investment is directed at five areas: technology, curriculum innovation, franchise enablement, operational excellence and customer experience. The inclusion of franchise enablement as a named investment line is the detail worth noting — it is the difference between selling territories and building a system that partners can actually run.
Manish Gupta, Business Head at Jalsa Ventures, framed the next phase around institutional capability rather than store count.
Every successful organisation reaches a point where systems become more important than individuals.
For an education network, that statement carries more weight than it does in retail. A pre-school franchise sells outcomes that parents evaluate over years, not a transaction they judge in minutes. Teacher recruitment, curriculum fidelity, safety compliance and centre-level leadership all have to hold at 2,000 locations as reliably as they did at 200. Networks that scale faster than their training pipeline tend to discover this through enrolment churn.
India’s early childhood and supplementary education segments have been among the most franchise-friendly categories in Asia Pacific for a decade. The unit economics suit local entrepreneurs: modest fit-out, leasehold rather than freehold property, recurring fee revenue, and demand that is concentrated in exactly the tier-2 and tier-3 cities where organised brands are thinnest.
The Shard Center for Innovation line is the more interesting strategic move. Placing AI, robotics and drone curricula alongside Montessori pre-schools lets the group hold a family from age three into secondary-school skills programmes, which lifts lifetime value per household and gives franchise partners a second revenue stream inside the same catchment.
Indian education groups scaling this quickly typically become acquisition targets, regional exporters, or both. Master franchise interest in ASEAN and the GCC for Indian-origin education formats has grown alongside the South Asian diaspora in those markets, and a group with a working franchise enablement function is far better positioned to license internationally than one that has only ever recruited domestically.
The number to watch is not 2,000. It is how many of the centres opened in 2025 and 2026 are still trading, and still full, in 2028.
Related reading: Best Franchises for Asia in 2026, Blue Tokai’s first GCC cafe in Dubai and Franchising in the Philippines 2026. Country-level education and development data is published by the World Bank.
