VMPL
New Delhi [India], October 14: Bengaluru-based student community platform Campus Binge is entering India's education technology sector with an AI-powered Career Intelligence platform designed to help students navigate the transition from school to college with greater confidence.
Backed by AIC at the Indian School of Business through the MeitY Startup Hub, the platform aims to help students navigate career and college decisions.
The venture follows founder Rishitabh Thapliyal's exit from Puzzles Living, the student housing brand he built to 14 properties, more than 1,000 beds and approximately US$2 million in annual recurring revenue. Having spent years working within India's student ecosystem, Rishitabh is now turning his attention to what he sees as a deeper challenge: the lack of accessible, structured and personalised guidance for students making critical academic and career decisions.
While information on courses, colleges and careers is widely available, translating it into a personalised decision often depends on informal networks, fragmented sources or access to professional counselling. Campus Binge is developing an AI-led guidance system that brings these decision-making inputs together, helping students explore career pathways, evaluate academic options and make more informed choices throughout the school-to-college transition.
Speaking about the development, Rishitabh Thapliyal, Founder of Campus Binge, said, “India's education market is defined by deep information asymmetry. Students have more choices than ever, but the decision-making layer hasn't kept pace. We are building infrastructure that brings structured, personalised career intelligence to students at scale, the kind of guidance that today exists only for those with the right networks or resources.”
He added, “The question driving us is: why does access to quality career guidance remain unequal for most Indian students? Campus Binge was built out of that answer.”
The company is supported by AIC at the Indian School of Business (ISB) through its Entrepreneur-in-Residence (EIR) ecosystem and is backed through the MeitY Startup Hub. It is also supported by Startup Uttarakhand and Startup Punjab.
Campus Binge sees Career Intelligence as more than an information or counselling layer. Its objective is to help students understand the relationship between their interests, academic choices and potential career pathways, while providing a structured way to compare and evaluate options before making high-stakes decisions.
From Student Housing to Career Intelligence
Rishitabh's experience in the student ecosystem began in 2020, when he started building digital student communities during the pandemic, while still a college student. These communities offered students spaces to connect, exchange information and navigate uncertainty. Over time, this work revealed a recurring challenge for students relocating to new cities: finding reliable accommodation and accessing organised support.
After graduating in 2022, Rishitabh founded Puzzles Living, a student housing brand built through partnerships with local paying guest (PG) operators in Bengaluru, taking over their sales, branding and student community experience. The asset-light model brought multiple local PGs under a unified brand, enabling the business to scale to 14 properties, more than 1,000 beds and approximately US$2 million in annual recurring revenue. During this period, Rishitabh also became the youngest member of the Rental Housing Association of India.
Following the business's growth, Rishitabh sold the Puzzles Living brand to its operating partners and stepped back to explore a broader challenge he had observed throughout his work with students: the difficulty of making informed decisions about education and careers.
The transition from housing to Career Intelligence reflects a shift from addressing students' immediate living needs to tackling the information and decision-making gaps that shape their longer-term futures. Through the ISB ecosystem, Campus Binge further developed its thesis, receiving support from AIC ISB through its GENESIS EIR programme and bringing on early team members from the ISB ecosystem.
As artificial intelligence increasingly moves beyond information retrieval towards personalised decision support, Campus Binge is positioning Career Intelligence as an emerging layer in education technology, one designed to help students not only find information, but understand their options and act on them.
About Campus Binge
Campus Binge is an AI-powered Career Intelligence platform helping students navigate the school-to-college transition through personalised, data-driven guidance. Supported by AIC at the Indian School of Business through the MeitY Startup Hub, and by Startup Uttarakhand and Startup Punjab, the company aims to make structured career guidance more accessible to students across India.
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