When Aparna Krishnan, a Bengaluru-based executive, began looking for a preschool for her toddler, FirstCry Intellitots was one of the names that appeared on her radar. She, however, did not look at it seriously, as “there wasn’t a branch nearby”.
Aparna wanted the school to be close to home, have a playground, a good teacher-student ratio, and reasonable fees. At one point, she even considered a preschool where she could get a corporate discount, but ruled it out as it was too far and overcrowded.
Eventually, she chose Orchids International, a preschool within walking distance of her home.
Aparna’s decision underscores why FirstCry’s Intellitots bet is still a work in progress. The baby products company entered the preschool education arena—for kids aged between two and six—in 2019, through the acquisition of Oi Playschool. It later expanded the business under the Intellitots brand. The grand plan: to build a network of around 1,000 schools within five years.
On paper, few companies were better positioned, given the adjacency to its core vertical. The retailer today sells everything from diapers and strollers to toys and baby apparel. It even runs a parenting content platform filled with blogs and videos on child care. And it isn’t just online—FirstCry also operates a network of physical stores.
If any internet company could build a preschool network efficiently, it should have been FirstCry. But things haven’t quite worked out that way, although they have worked out profitably.
To begin with, while it may have aimed for a thousand, Intellitots today operates only about 436 preschools, across 190 cities. The company enrolled about 23,000 students in its preschools in FY26, and has had 55,000 since inception. But it is nowhere close to becoming a meaningful challenger to established preschool chains such as Kidzee, which has enrolled 1.8 million kids since inception, and EuroKids (1 million).
So, six years on, the ₹47 crore business is just a blip on parent Brainbees’ balance sheet, accounting for less than 1% of its ₹8,500 crore top line. FirstCry still accounts for nearly two-thirds of the group revenue through its core baby products. Globalbees, a sister entity that owns stakes in dozens of consumer brands, and in which FirstCry has a 52% stake, brings in slightly less than 25% of Brainbees’ revenue. None of them is into apiculture, though one could be forgiven for thinking that. Intellitots, meanwhile, is yet to live up to those group names and create a buzz.
“The intent was never purely cross-selling. There was a genuine belief that a scaled, organized preschool brand could succeed in what remains a highly fragmented market,” says Amit Singh, who served as regional manager for franchises at FirstCry between 2019 and 2021. The plan, however, didn’t go by the script.
Nevertheless, Supam Maheshwari, FirstCry’s MD and CEO, says he does not view the business through the lens of revenue alone. “It may not solve monetization to a large extent, but it creates a beautiful ecosystem for us in terms of building trust and relationships with young parents,” he says. In his telling, Intellitots is more than just a preschool chain—it is an extension of a bond that begins at birth.
First outreach
Every day, in hospitals across India, thousands of new mothers receive a small gift package called the FirstCry Box. The package is free, thanks to the company’s tieups with hospitals. Inside are some of the first things a newborn will need: diapers, baby lotion, baby oil and other essentials. The box is often one of the earliest interactions a young parent has with the FirstCry brand. And it is a connection that runs wide—the company delivered 2.6 million of them in FY26, equivalent to 10% of all newborns in India.
The marketing initiative captures what FirstCry has spent more than a decade developing—an ecosystem around parenting. The company has built one of India's largest databases of new and expecting parents—as of Q4, FY26, that number stood at about 11 million unique transacting customers.
As Angshuman Bhattacharya, Partner and National Leader of the Consumer Products and Retail Sector at EY puts it, historically, the company’s strongest engagement with parents has been through children in the 0–2 age group, in categories such as diapers, before gradually moving them towards apparel, toys and other products. Moving into early childhood education offered a way to deepen those relationships.
“We always believed there are three fundamental needs of a young parent, other than healthcare. The first is shopping, the second is parenting guidance and the third is education,” Maheshwari told Mint. “Our mission was to support parents through every stage of that journey. We had built the shopping ecosystem and one of the largest parenting content platforms in the country. Education felt like a natural extension.”
Unlike retail, the preschool business required little capital from FirstCry itself. The model is largely franchise-led, with partners bearing the costs of real estate, infrastructure, furniture and staffing. FirstCry provides the brand, curriculum, training and operational support.
That structure allows the business to remain profitable even at a relatively modest scale. While Intellitots generates only about ₹47 crore in annual revenue, the margins are significantly higher than the core business. Intellitots’ adjusted Ebitda (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) margins increased from 24% to 27% in FY26, albeit on a tiny base. Whereas the India multi-channel business saw its adjusted Ebitda margin reduce from 9.5% in FY25 to 8.8% in FY26.
For parents, the annual bill isn’t exactly easy on the pocket. FirstCry Intellitots’ fee in Bengaluru is around 70,000-90,000 a year, according to Kiddenz, a preschool and daycare discovery platform.
Out of syllabus
The Intellitots network has grown steadily, but not at the pace initially envisioned. The company added 155 schools in FY25 and another 73 in FY26. That made it a name in the organized preschool market, but it remains well behind leaders Kidzee and EuroKids. But to be fair, those companies have had a headstart of decades to build their networks.
Moreover, there were extraneous circumstances that hobbled Maheshwari’s team at the get-go. Soon after they started out, the covid pandemic brought the world to a standstill, putting paid to their plans of setting up a thousand pre-schools across India.
Awareness remains another challenge. “A lot of people we speak to have no idea that FirstCry has preschools. On the ground, we still have to create awareness and do a lot of the marketing ourselves,” says Sagar Kathiriya, a FirstCry Intellitots franchise partner in Surat.
Kathiriya laments that FirstCry’s biggest edge, its vast parent ecosystem, has not translated into strong admissions support. “They have a lot of data on their ecommerce platform, but somehow they are not able to utilize it,” he says. “We received around 200 leads, but hardly anyone walked into the centre. If they could provide leads from nearby localities or parents with children in the right age group, the conversion rate would be much higher.”
Those observations echo what former regional manager Singh, cited earlier, has to say about the limitations of the original thesis. “The assumption was that FirstCry’s existing customer base would create a natural funnel into schools. In reality, conversions from existing shoppers to school enrolments hovered around 15-20% at best,” says Singh. He, however, did not indicate what the ideal level should be.
A local business
For all of FirstCry's advantages in technology, brand recognition and customer data, the preschool business eventually comes down to something old-fashioned: location, people and trust.
For instance, Aparna Krishnan enrolled her child in Orchids International for one key reason: it was very close to her home. That decision highlights one of the biggest realities of the preschool business. Unlike ecommerce, where a customer can be acquired from anywhere, preschool enrolment decisions are often determined by ease of access. And much of the market is still controlled by local operators.
Industry executives say parents in large cities increasingly look for differentiated offerings, better infrastructure and premium experiences. In smaller towns, however, established legacy brands often continue to hold an advantage. That creates a difficult middle ground for newer entrants. FirstCry is neither positioned as a premium preschool chain, nor does it have the decades-long experience of some incumbents.
“Parents may experiment with a new app, but they are far more cautious when it comes to choosing a preschool for their child,” explains Mohan Kwatra, chief strategy officer at Petals Preschool. “It takes time to build trust. Every city requires a different playbook. From language preferences to curriculum communication to even finding the right property, everything becomes hyperlocal.”
Talent shortage is another issue. “India still doesn’t have a strong professional pipeline for early childhood educators. That becomes a constraint as chains try to scale,” says Swati Jain, founder and director of preschool and daycare chain The Banyan. “Teacher hiring becomes the hardest thing very quickly once you move beyond a few centres. Real estate is painful, but you can solve that with the right format and location strategy. Good preschool teachers are much harder to find and even harder to retain.”
Running each centre is like running a mini operating company, adds Jain. “There are admissions, parent interactions, teachers, safety, complaints, staffing gaps, events and daily operations. In an internet business, if the app works, the customer experience is largely standardized. In preschools, the experience depends on human beings delivering consistently every day, at every location,” she says.
Maheshwari argues that Intellitots’ differentiation lies in its curriculum, technology and the support it provides franchise partners. Through its education app, parents receive daily updates on classroom activities, teacher interactions and learning progress. The FirstCry app shows printable worksheets for Math, English and other categories and the company has introduced features such as bedtime stories, nursery rhymes and educational content through what it calls Intelli Radio.
“We provide a lot of visibility into what the child is doing every day. Parents know what their child has learnt, what activities they have participated in and how they are progressing,” says the founder. “There are many features we have built over time that help young parents choose our preschools and business partners [franchises] choose us as their preferred partner.”
EuroKids’ and Kidzee’s mobile applications are available only to parents enrolled with their schools, restricting an independent review. Neither company responded to Mint’s requests for comment. EuroKids’ website, however, notes that “the report feature on the app gives a parent information on the progress of the child on a daily basis”.
Ecosystem bet
The apicultural absence of honey notwithstanding, the Brainbees stock is in bear territory—the company went public in August 2024, listing at a healthy premium to its initial public offering price of ₹465 a share. On Wednesday, it ended at ₹222, well below the IPO price, an indication that growth is slowing across parts of the business.
The floundering stock is an indicator of the headwinds assailing the group. “The challenge for FirstCry is that its core categories are becoming increasingly competitive,” concurs Satish Meena, ecommerce analyst and co-founder, Datum Intelligence, a research firm.
That does not mean Intellitots needs to step up and become a billion-dollar business. Maheshwari is candid that even when Intellitots eventually crosses ₹100 crore in revenue, it will remain small relative to FirstCry's overall scale.
“Will revenue cross ₹100 crore? For sure. But will it become material in our overall grand scheme? The answer is obviously no. But will it make strategic sense? One hundred percent.” Every preschool, he believes, will become a physical touchpoint for the FirstCry brand.
While its ambitions might be less than modest, FirstCry believes there is huge potential waiting to be tapped. The company estimates that India has roughly 80,000 preschools, of which nearly 80-85% remain unorganized. Maheshwari believes that creates a long runway for the organized sector to expand. “In a 3-4 year window, we will definitely cross 1,000 schools,” he says.
