We've been quietly tutoring 11,000 children since 2011.
No franchise. No celebrity tutors. No marketing tricks. Just a small team of specialists who've spent 14 years figuring out how to help children walk into exams confident and walk out proud of their score.
Talk to a coordinator →It started in a Mumbai apartment.
In 2011, Chirag Rathod scored a perfect 1600 on the SAT. Soon after, friends started asking him to tutor their younger siblings. He said yes. Then their cousins. Then their cousins' friends.
Within a year, what began as informal sessions at his dining table had turned into a small operation — three tutors, twelve students, and a slowly-growing reputation among Mumbai parents who'd noticed something different: this wasn't tutoring optimised for the company. It was tutoring optimised for the child.
Fourteen years later, AP Guru tutors families across 30+ countries, has helped 11,000+ students achieve scores they didn't think were possible, and remains stubbornly independent — no investors, no franchise, no shortcuts.
We've made plenty of mistakes along the way. We tried to scale faster than we should have in 2017 and quality dipped. We rebuilt the entire tutor vetting process in 2019. We launched and quietly killed three side products that didn't serve students.
What's stayed constant is the bet: if every child gets a real specialist who genuinely cares about their score, everything else takes care of itself. That's still the bet. And after 11,000 students, it still works.
I kept noticing the same gap. Big tutoring chains had infrastructure but no soul. Small tutors had soul but no infrastructure. Parents deserved both.
Chirag Rathod
Founder · AP Guru
The beginning
First 12 students tutored from a Mumbai apartment.
First international student
Online tutoring goes live in Singapore & Dubai.
Crossed 2,000 students
Quality dipped. We rebuilt the entire tutor vetting process.
Online-first reset
Pandemic accelerated our shift to a fully remote model.
Hit 7,000 students
Coordinator program launched. Parent satisfaction jumped 24%.
11,000+ students & counting
30 countries, 150 tutors, still family-run.
Four principles. No exceptions.
These aren't marketing copy. They're the operating rules we hire against, fire against, and reject revenue against.
One human owns your child's file.
From the first inquiry to exam day, one coordinator and one tutor own your child's progress. No handoffs, no "who's that?" emails, no being passed between departments. Continuity isn't a feature — it's the entire product.
Specialists, not generalists.
An IB Math HL tutor doesn't teach SAT. An AP Chemistry specialist doesn't teach IGCSE Bio. Every tutor does one thing, deeply. The result: they recognise patterns from teaching the same exam 200+ times, not 10.
Honest projections, not promises.
If your child's diagnostic suggests a 1450 SAT is realistic, we tell you 1450 — not 1550 to win the deal. Setting expectations honestly is how we keep families for years instead of months.
We'd rather lose a student than mislead a family.
About 1 in 3 demos end with us recommending a different solution. Sometimes it's a different curriculum specialist. Sometimes it's group classes if that's a better fit. Trust compounds. We're playing the long game.
Fourteen years of quiet work.
Numbers we track because they matter to families. Not vanity metrics. Not pageviews. The stats that mean something to your child's outcome.
The people who started this.
Four people lead AP Guru day-to-day. Two of them have been here since 2011. All four answer their own emails.
Chirag Rathod
Started AP Guru in 2011 after scoring 1600 on the SAT. Still teaches a handful of students every year because, in his words, "you stop getting better the moment you stop teaching."
Priya Sharma
Joined Chirag in 2012. Leads the team that designs every program. Built our IB Math HL curriculum from scratch — it's now used by 600+ students a year across 15 countries.
Rohan Mehra
Runs the four-stage tutor vetting process. Personally screens every new hire. Has rejected over 2,400 applicants in the last three years — our acceptance rate is under 4%.
Aarti Reddy
Built and leads the coordinator program. Believes the best tutoring company is the one parents can text at 9pm and get a reply by 9:12pm. (We measure this. We're at 12 minutes average.)
150+ tutors. One mission.
Specialists hand-picked through a four-stage interview. Top 4% of applicants. All full-time educators.
Aakash Mehta
IB Math HL
Kavita Sharma
SAT · ACT
Dr. Rahul Patel
AP Chem · IB Chem HL
Neha Verma
A-Level Physics
Sara Iqbal
IB English HL
James Tanaka
SAT Math · AP Calc
Maya Krishnan
IB Bio HL
Daniel Goh
A-Level Econ
Pooja Khanna
IGCSE Maths
Vikram Rao
AP Physics C
Emma Lim
IB History HL
Sanjay Bhatt
SAT Verbal
Six honest contrasts.
The biggest gaps between most tutoring companies and how we run AP Guru. None of these are perfect — they're trade-offs we made deliberately.
Quietly recognised by people who matter.
Tell us your curriculum. We'll handle the rest.
Book a free 30-minute call. Meet a coordinator. Get an honest plan for your child. No obligation, no pressure — just the same conversation we've had with 11,000 families before yours.
