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On a humid evening in a middle-class Indian home, a familiar scene unfolds. A baby cries. The pressure cooker whistles. A phone lights up. And in that small, chaotic gap between exhaustion and urgency, a parent makes a choice that millions make every day: they hand over a screen.
For most, it feels like relief. But for Pune resident Nikita Prakash Aakhade, it felt like a question. During her pregnancy, she began reading extensively about parenting. The question stayed with her after her daughter was born in 2022. “What is this actually doing to my baby’s brain?” she remembers asking herself.
That uncomfortable, inconvenient and deeply personal question would eventually lead her to launch BrainyTots in 2023, a Pune-based early childhood development brand that positions itself not merely as a toy company, but as something far more ambitious—a “parenting operating system” for India’s youngest generation.
A problem that doesn’t look like one
India is in the middle of a quiet shift. Screens are everywhere—in living rooms, strollers and dining tables. Increasingly, they are also in the hands of children who cannot yet speak.
According to global and Indian paediatric guidelines, children under the age of two should not be exposed to screens. Yet the reality is starkly different. Across urban India, toddlers are spending hours each day on mobile devices, often as a coping mechanism for parents balancing work, home and the invisible labour of childcare.
What makes this trend worrying, experts say, is not just the time spent on screens, but what screens replace. During the earliest years of life, a child’s brain develops through interaction—eye contact, babbling, pointing and responding. Scientists call this “serve and return”: a baby makes a sound, a parent responds. Repeated thousands of times, this loop builds the foundations for language, cognition and emotional regulation.
Nikita says, “A screen doesn’t serve and return. It responds, but it doesn’t relate.”
That distinction, she realised, was everything.
BrainyTots did not begin in a boardroom or on a pitch deck. It began on the floor of a home, late at night, with a tired mother trying to do better.
“I wasn’t looking to build a company, I was trying to survive parenting without using a screen,” Nikita says.
Like many new parents, she found herself overwhelmed by conflicting advice and an endless stream of information that explained what was right but rarely showed how to put it into practice.
“What I needed wasn’t more information,” she says. “I needed something I could do in five minutes, on a bad day.”
That insight became the foundation of BrainyTots—not more knowledge, but a practical, usable method.
Engineering childhood
After studying global early childhood development frameworks—including Harvard research, Montessori principles and the WHO-UNICEF nurturing care model—Nikita noticed a recurring pattern.
“Across everything credible, the same core ideas kept repeating,” she says. “Stimulus. Interaction. Repetition. Progression. Rest.”
She translated those principles into physical products, each designed to build a specific developmental skill at a particular stage of childhood.
The first was the Rainbow Wheel.
“When a child begins to lift her head during tummy time, she starts developing the muscles she’ll need to crawl. So I designed the Rainbow Wheel with that in mind. It’s placed just out of the baby’s reach.
“She will lift her head and reach for the Rainbow Wheel with one hand, turning it as she stretches. What this does is help develop her core muscles as she reaches forward and gradually moves towards crawling.”
Another bestseller is the Numbers Peg Board, designed for children around age 2.
“Around the age of two, a child stops just repeating numbers and starts wanting to count real things with her own hands. That’s the exact moment I designed the Numbers Peg Board for. It’s a simple wooden set—ten little boards numbered 1 to 10, with a set of chunky wooden pegs.
“The child reads the number, then places that many pegs into the board—one peg for 1, two for 2, and so on. As her fingers pick up and push in each peg, two things grow at once: she learns what a number actually means, not just how it sounds, and her pincer grip gets stronger—the very grip she’ll need later to hold a pencil. It’s one of our bestsellers, and it’s the toy parents tell me their toddlers keep coming back to.”
Built in India, for Indian homes
What distinguishes the brand is not just its design philosophy, but its understanding of Indian homes.
Every product is designed, tested and manufactured in India. Materials such as birch, beech and neem wood are selected not only for safety but also for familiarity. The size, weight and durability are adapted to Indian households.
Nikita develops the designs while manufacturing is outsourced to specialist producers across the country. Some work with cloth, others with wood. Finished products arrive in Pune, where they are stored in the basement of her home before being shipped to customers.
More importantly, the system is built around the realities of Indian parenting.
“This isn’t a Scandinavian nursery with unlimited time and space, this is a home where a grandmother has opinions, a helper is involved, and the parent is tired,” she says.
From living room to market
What began as a personal experiment has evolved into a growing business.
Her first customer was a friend who bought an early learning kit for babies aged 0-4 months. Since then, BrainyTots has expanded to major e-commerce platforms and built a portfolio of around 150 products. The bootstrapped company is now tracking towards a projected revenue of ₹3 crore in the coming financial year.
Unlike many consumer startups, BrainyTots has not raised venture capital.
“We invested ₹25 lakhs initially. We wanted to get the product right before we scaled,” Nikita says. “This isn’t something you fix in the next sprint if it goes wrong.”
The company has, however, received institutional validation. It secured a grant from Dettol (Reckitt) and is currently part of an anganwadi pilot programme—a move that could take its methodology beyond urban homes into grassroots childcare systems.
For Nikita, that transition is essential.
“The screen problem is not limited to one class or one city,” she says. “It’s everywhere.”
Competing With the Most Powerful Product in the World
Ask Nikita about competition, and she does not begin with other toy companies.
“Our biggest competitor is the phone,” she says.
It is a striking but realistic assessment. Smartphones are ubiquitous, effectively free at the point of use, and designed by some of the world’s best engineers to capture attention. For exhausted parents, they are often the easiest solution.
BrainyTots is not trying to eliminate that reality. Instead, it hopes to offer parents an easier alternative in those difficult moments.
The book that became a movement
While the toys are the company’s most visible products, its most influential offering may be a book.
The Daily Parenting Toolkit (0–3 Years) distils the BrainyTots philosophy into six practical systems covering routine, feeding, sleep, play and screen replacement strategies.
Its reception has surprised the founders.
Customers rarely describe it as informative. They describe it as relieving.
That emotional response, Nikita believes, represents the company’s true product-market fit.
“Parents don’t need to be told they’re doing something wrong,” she says. “They need to be shown what to do instead.”
A different kind of growth
Looking ahead, BrainyTots is preparing to raise its first institutional funding round of around ₹2 crore to scale manufacturing, expand distribution and build a digital companion platform.
Even as the company grows, Nikita insists it will remain grounded in its original philosophy.
“No vanity metrics,” she says. “Every rupee should move us closer to replacing screen time with real interaction.”
The long-term ambition is to become the default early childhood development system in Indian homes and, eventually, a global reference point for screen-free parenting.
A founder’s conviction
At the heart of BrainyTots is not just a product, but a perspective.
Nikita does not present herself as an expert lecturing parents. She presents herself as one of them.
“I’ve stood exactly where they’re standing,” she says.
Alongside her co-founder and husband, Amol Endait, who brings FMCG and consumer market expertise, the company operates with a clear division of roles: one builds the product, the other helps it reach parents.
Ultimately, BrainyTots is not trying to reinvent parenting. It is trying to change a single moment—the moment when a parent reaches for something, anything, to make life easier.
If that moment shifts, even slightly, the impact could be profound.
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