“Babies at birth are smarter than any person on Planet Earth”

An alum of the top-ranked Georgia Tech University and Stanford University, USA, Raghav Himatsingka is founder-CEO of the Mumbai-based Raising Superstars Pvt. Ltd and inventor of the Prodigy Baby app that arouses the latent potential of 0-6 year-old children. Excerpts from an online interview: (see https://www.educationworld.in/ew-interview-raghav-himatsingka-co-founder-raising-superstars/) An engineering graduate with a postgrad degree in management from Stanford, you have transformed into an evangelist of early childhood care and education. What’s the explanation of this career switch? It all happened at a time when I was deeply concerned about my child’s well-being, his education, his future amid the Covid pandemic lockdown. Earlier after completing my higher studies at Georgia Tech and Stanford universities, I returned to India and joined the family business. Later I founded my own travel & logistics company, Truckola. But when Covid hit, it also massively hit the transport and logistics industry and I was compelled to shut down the company. Consequently, I left Mumbai and moved back to Kolkata with my parents. Around the same time, I also became a father. With all this at the top of my mind, I started Prodigy Baby as a small business to sustain my family and myself. Now four years on, how satisfied are you with the progress of the company? Raising Superstars is a category creator and category leader. There’s no such company in the world at our scale doing what we are doing. There are many physical spaces but nothing in the online world. We are blessed to have 300,000 lifetime parent members in 167 countries worldwide. We have a headcount of 67 employees and half of our business revenue comes from India, and the other half from abroad. Is it like an online class for parents? No, it’s not an online class. The way it works is we provide instructions to parents on some activities they should do with infants through pre-recorded videos of 7-8 minutes. You watch the video, and know precisely what you have to do. Each activity presented for children takes less than 5 minutes in a day. There’s no screen time for the child because we believe that it’s super evil for infants. The app is only for parents. What is the price range of your videos? The price differs from country to country because our costs of production differ. In India, it starts from Rs.500 and could go up to Rs.1.5 lakh for the entire program. What outcomes can parents and infants expect from this app? We never promise that your child will get into IIT or Stanford. Our purpose is to enable babies to realise the best version of their talents and potential. The Prodigy Baby framework is a holistic system to develop whole skills at the foundational level. For example, babies that follow our programs do belly crawling at three months instead of the usual eight months. Their speaking, language, reading, math, memory development, creativity, and problem-solving skills will develop earlier than the norm, including character traits such as persistence,…