About
Bootstrapped from Baleswar, building for Bharat.
NIGOC Ninetech is a 2-person, MSME-registered Indian private limited company building an AI-first admissions and career counseling agent for India's 100 million school-leavers — in every Indian language they speak.
The math problem
100M students. Fewer than 50,000 counselors. The math doesn't work.
Every year, more than 100 million Indian students navigate one of the most consequential decisions of their lives — which college, which stream, which scholarship, which career. India has fewer than 50,000 trained admission counselors. Most of those are concentrated in tier-1 metros, charging fees that put them out of reach for the families that need them most.
A trained counselor can serve perhaps 80-100 students a year well. To serve all of India's grade-12 cohort, the country would need 1.2 million counselors. We are not going to get there with humans.
Generative AI is the first technology in history that can deliver personalized 1-on-1 guidance at this ratio. That is the problem NIGOC was incorporated to solve.
Our story
Founded the week after JEE Mains 2024 results.
NIGOC began with a cousin in Baleswar — JEE Mains 2024 ranker, no idea which engineering branch fit his profile, no counselor in his town who would meet without a ₹25,000 retainer. The family asked Niranjan to "look it up online." It took him three weekends with twenty browser tabs to give a recommendation he was sure of.
That experience is repeated 100 million times every year in India, in every household where the parents did not themselves attend college. There is no shortage of information. There is a shortage of guidance — someone to read a student's actual profile, weigh their actual constraints, and recommend the actual next step.
NIGOC NINETECH PRIVATE LIMITED was incorporated on 25 October 2024 at the Registrar of Companies, Cuttack (CIN U85500OD2024PTC047156). We registered as a MICRO enterprise with the Ministry of MSME (UDYAM-OD-03-0056432) and as a Startup India eligible entity through DPIIT.
We are bootstrapped. The two of us, plus a part-time content team that helps us keep the college and scholarship indexes fresh, plus AI inference paid for through cloud-startup credit programs. We are operationally lean by design — the cost of running an agent that scales with traffic is fundamentally lower than the cost of running a counseling network that scales with people.
Milestones
From idea to invite-only beta in 18 months.
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Jul 2024
Idea validated, three CBSE schools agreed to pilot.
Mayurbhanj and Bhadrak district schools sign LoIs in exchange for guidance for their grade-12 cohort.
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Oct 2024
Incorporated · CIN U85500OD2024PTC047156
Registered with ROC Cuttack (Eastern region). Niranjan Sethi and Gautam Jena named directors.
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Dec 2024
MSME Udyam + DPIIT Startup India recognition.
UDYAM-OD-03-0056432 (MICRO). Unlocked government priority procurement & tax filings under MSMED Act.
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Feb 2025
First English + Hindi MVP, 80 students.
Three CBSE schools in Odisha give us their entire grade-12 cohort for a closed pilot. Outcomes documented on the student stories page.
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Sep 2025
Scaled to 8 languages, 600 students.
Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Gujarati, Odia added. RAG over UGC-AISHE 2024-25 institution catalog (1,200+ colleges).
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Mar 2026
2,500 students in beta · 22 languages live
12 partner schools across Odisha, Maharashtra, Karnataka. Three signed partnership go-lives upcoming (2 CBSE + 1 Odisha state pilot).
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Coming Q3 2026
Public beta with B2B schools dashboard.
Counselor-for-Schools white-label launching alongside public student app. Independent privacy audit (DPDP 2023) scheduled June.
The Team
Two operators. One mission.
Niranjan Sethi
Director · Co-founder
DIN registered with MCA
Niranjan grew up in rural Mayurbhanj, the first in his family to graduate. He spent six years at Indian software product companies (Bengaluru and Hyderabad) building developer tools and ML infrastructure before returning to Odisha in 2024 to start NIGOC. Owns product, engineering, and partnerships.
Gautam Jena
Director · Co-founder
DIN registered with MCA
Gautam is a former secondary-school mathematics teacher (Kendriya Vidyalaya cadre) with a decade of classroom experience across CBSE board centers in Eastern India. At NIGOC he owns the curriculum knowledge base, the entrance-exam alignment models, and the on-ground school relationships across the Odisha and Bihar districts.
Advisors & contributors
A small council of part-time advisors helps NIGOC keep the knowledge base fresh: a retired UGC academic for the institutions catalog, a private-school principal in Pune for B2B feedback, a Hindi-Tamil-Telugu language data annotation team, and the Indian education policy reading group at our local Startup India hub. NIGOC is hiring contract language data leads for Marathi and Punjabi — see careers.
How we operate
Five principles that decide our roadmap.
1. Language equity over English-default.
Every model variant ships in at least 8 Indian languages before it goes GA. We will not launch an English-only feature.
2. First-gen learner first.
Our default user is a 17-year-old whose parents did not go to college. Every flow is designed assuming low prior context.
3. Outcomes, not engagement.
We track admissions confirmed, scholarships won, and post-graduation outcomes — not minutes-on-app or DAU.
4. DPDP-native, not retrofitted.
All student data is in Indian residency zones (AWS ap-south-1 Mumbai). DPDP Act 2023 was built into the schema, not added later.
5. Open about our limits.
The agent recommends; it does not predict the future. We publish our model evaluation methodology, our wrong-recommendation rate, and our disclosure of where an LLM hallucinated. (Read the latest evaluation report on our blog.)
For the record
Company facts.
Legal name
NIGOC NINETECH PRIVATE LIMITED
Incorporated
25 October 2024
CIN
U85500OD2024PTC047156
Registrar of Companies
Cuttack (Eastern Region)
GSTIN
21AAJCN9508L1Z6
PAN
AAJCN9508L
Udyam (MSME)
UDYAM-OD-03-0056432
MSME tier
MICRO enterprise (FY 2024-25)
Authorised capital
₹2,00,000
Paid-up capital
₹50,000
Registered office
1st Floor, Plot No 738/3389/3414, Khata No 1105/581, Mouza Darada, Basta, Baleswar District, Odisha 756022, India
Banker
Bandhan Bank · IFSC BDBL0001148
Want to bring NIGOC to your school or district?
We're enrolling schools and state pilots for the 2026-27 academic year through July.
Get in touch with the team →