Over tea at a roadside stall in Kanpur, Alakh Pandey's sister asked him a question meant to sting. If you quit engineering, she said, will you end up selling tea? He was in his third year at Harcourt Butler Technical University, studying on a loan, and she had travelled to talk him out of walking away. His answer, as it has been told, was that he would become a PhysicsWallah instead.
The name came out of an argument, but the stubbornness behind it was built much earlier. Pandey grew up in Allahabad, now Prayagraj, in a family of four that lost its house when bad times came and ended up in a slum. His mother had severe asthma. He remembers waiting with his sister outside government hospitals, sleeping on pavements, because those were the only places the family could afford. His father failed at most of the businesses he tried. Relatives pooled money so the children could stay in school, and by Class VIII he, his sister and their mother were tutoring younger students to keep the household going.
The name came out of an argument, but the stubbornness behind it was built much earlier.
He wanted to crack the IIT entrance, but coaching fees were out of reach. That gap is the whole company in miniature. When he left college after about two years, convinced the classroom added little, his mother supported him. His sister did not. His father thought the YouTube plan was risky. Pandey has said his father and a girlfriend both left him around then, and that physics is what kept him going.
So he taught the way he knew how: a marker, a whiteboard, a phone. The channel reached 10,000 subscribers within a year. Then 2020 arrived, with students stuck at home, and PW launched an app. On the first live class more than 40,000 students logged in at once, and the servers crashed. Pandey has said they never expected a response that big.
What nobody expected was how quickly the teacher would become a corporate. Prateek Maheshwari, the co-founder who thinks in return on investment and spends on marketing only when it brings enrolments, helped turn a teacher's channel into a company. By June 2022 PW was a unicorn. Offline centres and acquisitions followed.
The cost showed up in public. In 2023 former teachers alleged that Kota students were not getting an education worth their fees, and PW dismissed the claims as a distraction. That November it laid off around 150 people.
In November 2025 PW listed on the stock exchanges with a ₹3,480 crore issue, and the founders each hold just over 40 percent. For FY26 it reported revenue of ₹3,899.54 crore and cut its net loss to ₹24.17 crore.
The lesson for a first-time founder is hidden in that tea stall. Pandey did not search for a market; he built the thing he himself could not afford, and he said it out loud to the one person most likely to doubt him.