Gurukul started with a register, not a roadmap.
Gurukul is built in Nepal, for Nepal's schools first. This page is what we saw, what we decided to build, and why we are still at it.
One system, one record, no retyping.
Gurukul is a school management platform - student records, attendance, fee collection, examinations, report cards, timetables, staff HR, parent communication, and AI tools for teachers and students, in one system.
Fully localized for Nepal: Bikram Sambat (BS) dates, NEB and SEE grading, and eSewa, Khalti and Fonepay payments.
The modules were not digitised one at a time. They share a single record, so a number entered once shows up in attendance, on the report card and in the ledger without anyone typing it again. That is the whole design, and it is the part that saves a school its evenings.
Gurukul was started by an engineer, not an administrator - which is exactly why it began with watching.
Years of seeing Nepal's schools run an entire operation on Excel sheets, paper registers and WhatsApp groups. Years of seeing the software on offer either priced for US school districts or built a decade ago and never updated since. Eventually that turns into a plain question: what if the software worked for the school, instead of the school working for the software?
There are roughly 9,500 private schools here. A great many run without dedicated software of any kind, and much of what is on offer to the rest carries no student portal, no AI, and a price set for a different market. Nobody was going to build for a school in Butwal from an office in California.
So this is built here. The team sits in the same time zone as the schools it serves, uses the same calendar, and can be in a staff room the same week a principal says something is not working.
Four places a school day leaks time: the register, the spreadsheet, the chat thread, and the cash slip. None of them talk to each other, so the same fact is written down four times - and reconciled late on a Sunday.
Three things we kept hearing, and the evidence behind each.
3-5 hrs
per teacher, per week
Admin work eats teaching time
Marking registers, copying marks between sheets, writing the same report-card comment forty times. It is not the job anyone trained for, and it happens every week.
Source: Nepal Ministry of Education data
Capped
Kathmandu, April 2026
Fees now need a paper trail
Private schools face real scrutiny over fee increases, and municipalities have started capping them. A school that cannot produce a clean, auditable record of what was charged and collected is exposed.
Source: South China Morning Post, April 2026
8.3%
higher retention
Parents are the last to know
A student is absent and nobody at home hears about it until the next parents day. Schools that close that loop keep more students - the effect is measurable.
Source: CampusESP Research, 2024
"Supports multiple date formats" is not the same claim as Bikram Sambat.
The school year here does not start in January, and it is bounded by festivals that move against the Gregorian calendar every year. Terms, exams and the fee cycle all hang off that. Software that treats Bikram Sambat as a display preference gets the dates right and the term boundaries wrong.
The platform itself is calendar-, currency- and board-agnostic - it supports both Bikram Sambat and Gregorian dates, any fee currency, and any school structure. A market is a configuration layer on top: its calendar, its examination boards, and its payment rails.
How the BS school year actually runsGurukul Yatra: we go where the schools do not reach.
Software helps a school that already has computers and a connection. A lot of them do not. So the team travels - to villages, with a backpack - and teaches computer skills, AI basics and digital literacy to students who have never had a class in any of it.
No satellite campus, no monthly fee, nothing to sign up for. It is free, and it is the part of this that is not a business model.
See where Yatra has beenWork with us
Want to build this with us?
A small team, building tools that principals and teachers open every morning. If that is the kind of work you want, we should talk.
Talk to us.
Tell us how your school runs today - what is on paper, what is in Excel, what happens on WhatsApp. That is the conversation we are useful in.
Email us
info@gurukulhq.com
Where we are
Kathmandu, Nepal
What happens next
- Someone on the team reads it - there is no sales sequence.
- If a demo makes sense, we walk your own workflow, not a script.
- If Gurukul is the wrong fit, we will say so.