Inside Masters’ Union: How Pratham Mittal is building a startup-style business school inside Corporate India

In Gurugram’s business district, there is a campus that looks less like a college and more like a young company embedded inside Corporate India.

The classrooms share walls with consulting firms and banks. Students spend as much time pitching, building and managing P&Ls as they do inside lectures.

This is Masters’ Union, founded by Pratham Mittal – a third-generation entrepreneur who believes India doesn’t just need more universities, it needs a new template for how they’re built and run.

A legacy of building – from sweets to universities

Mittal’s story doesn’t start in a boardroom. It starts in post-Partition Jalandhar, where his grandfather, Baldev Raj Mittal, arrived as a refugee and began by selling tea and biscuits to an army battalion. Very quickly, he realised there was more margin in making sweets than reselling packaged products – a small but decisive pivot that led to the now-famous Lovely Sweets.

He treated the shop like a living case study. Loss-making samosas brought people into the store; the aroma and variety converted them into customers for higher-margin products.

At a time when most sweet shops left trays open on dusty counters, he chose an enclosed, fan-cooled store and a deliberate English name, “Lovely,” to signal aspiration in a conservative market.

The second generation, led by Pratham’s father, Dr. Ashok Mittal, scaled that mindset into Lovely Professional University (LPU), one of India’s best-known private universities.

For Pratham, that meant growing up at the intersection of small-shop frugality and large-scale education. Counting cash at the counter and watching a university expand around him became, in his words, his “first business school.”

From Wharton to Neta App: experiments in systems

When Mittal went to the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, he landed in an ecosystem where building companies between classes was normal. Students weren’t just reading about startups; they were creating them. That shaped his view of what real education should look like.

During this period, he co-founded Outgrow with Randy Rayess, a SaaS platform that lets businesses create interactive calculators, quizzes and other tools to generate qualified leads. The product grew to serve clients across industries and geographies, and taught Mittal how quickly products and user expectations can evolve.

Back in India, he turned his attention to politics and accountability with Neta App – a civic-tech platform that let citizens rate and review elected representatives, often described as a “report card for leaders.”

The app saw millions of users before it was wound down, but it left Mittal with one strong belief: well-designed systems can nudge behaviour faster than policy debates.

That thinking soon turned toward higher education.

“We’re a business that teaches business”

By 2020, Mittal had come to a blunt conclusion: business education hadn’t kept pace with a world where virtually every company is now a tech company. The traditional model – fixed syllabi, heavy infrastructure, and tenured faculty – looked, to him, a century out of date.

Masters’ Union was his answer. Framed as a practitioner-led business school, it launched with the Post Graduate Programme in Technology and Business Management (PGP-TBM).

Instead of long, static lectures, students run live projects, build startups, manage investment portfolios and learn directly from founders, CXOs and investors who are active in their fields. The curriculum is flexible by design and updated as markets shift.

On the operations side, the school is deliberately built like a startup. Rather than spending hundreds of crores on a standalone campus, Masters’ Union leases space in a DLF corporate park in Gurugram – turning what is usually a fixed capital cost into a variable operating expense, and giving students daily proximity to the very companies they aspire to join or compete with.

Faculty, too, is treated differently. The institution relies on a rotating pool of industry practitioners instead of a fully tenured academic bench. The idea is that “boardroom to classroom” knowledge should move quickly, keeping courses aligned with what’s actually happening in sectors like fintech, D2C, capital markets and AI-driven businesses.

Scaling a school like a portfolio of startups

Inside Masters’ Union, each major programme – from PGP-TBM and PGP Rise to Bharat immersion tracks and capital markets offerings – operates almost like its own business unit with a “mini-CEO” in charge. These leaders own budgets, student satisfaction and outcomes, and are encouraged to innovate while staying accountable for results.

The early days required something rarer than a growth hack: trust. With no alumni network and no placement history, the founding team personally called thousands of aspirants from entrance-test databases. Sixty students decided to join the first cohort – the “Super 60” – effectively becoming proof-of-concept for the model. Their outcomes, including funded startups and strong placements, became the first real marketing engine.

The brand has continued to grow with surprisingly lean spends. According to the institution, the annual marketing budget, including salaries, is under Rs 5 crore – a fraction of what traditional MBA brands put into billboards and mass media.

Instead, Masters’ Union focuses on high-signal, shareable experiences: distinct campus design elements, content-driven thought leadership and student-led storytelling on platforms like LinkedIn.

More than 60% of admissions in recent years have come via alumni and word-of-mouth referrals, a ratio even older institutions aspire to.

The harder question: can this model scale without losing its edge?

As Masters’ Union adds programs and experiments with undergraduate offerings and new formats, the challenge shifts from “can this work?” to “can this stay sharp at scale?”

The institution’s answer lies in system-design: asset-light infrastructure, practitioner-led teaching, decentralised leadership and a strong emphasis on culture – hiring “intrapreneurs,” giving them autonomy, and keeping toxicity out of the system. It is an attempt to build a school that behaves much more like the startups its students want to build.

Whether that bet pays off over the next decade will depend on placement outcomes, alumni impact and how well the model adapts to regulation and competition.

But one thing is clear: in a sector dominated by legacy brands, Masters’ Union is trying to compete not on buildings or billboards, but on how differently it approaches the fundamentals of higher education.

Want the full playbook?

This is just a slice of the story. In the 3rd edition of The Indian Dream magazine, we go much deeper into:

• The detailed economics behind Masters’ Union’s asset-light model
• How programme “mini-CEOs” are measured and incentivised
• The internal culture playbook that blends family-style loyalty with startup-style accountability
• Pratham Mittal’s long-term blueprint for making India a global higher-education hub

Read the complete deep-dive on Masters’ Union in The Indian Dream – Issue 3 and explore the full sector analysis on EdTech, Agritech, Cleantech and Consumer Service Tech at: IndianDream.club