Meet the Man Turning Higher Education's Biggest Headache Into Its Next Big Opportunity

For nearly two decades, Ankit Khare has watched India's higher education sector chase a single number — admissions. Today, as Founder and CEO of UniBridge Consulting, he is trying to convince universities that the number that truly matters is a very different one: the cost of acquiring each student, and what that student is actually worth to the institution over time.

An Entrepreneurial Beginning

Khare's journey into education did not start with UniBridge. It began in 2012, when he co-founded Unipro Education, a digital marketing company built exclusively for the education sector. Over almost 14 years, Unipro grew into one of the sector’s recognised players, eventually merging with CollegeDekho. Khare stayed on through the transition, serving as Chief Business Officer of the vertical for close to three years — a role that gave him a ringside view of how universities actually market, recruit, and retain students at scale, and where the system routinely breaks down.

That experience was followed by a consulting stint with a Bengaluru-based technology company in the online education space. It was here that Khare spotted a gap that would eventually define his next venture: a large number of universities held regulatory approval to run online degree programmes but simply lacked the operational expertise, technology, or internal capability to build and scale them.

Building UniBridge

That gap became the founding premise of UniBridge Consulting, which Khare launched in 2025 with a small founding team. The idea, as he puts it, was to move "consulting with execution" — not just diagnosing problems for universities, but staying on to fix them.

UniBridge operates on what Khare calls a Build, Operate, Transfer model. For institutions with approvals but no existing online education business, UniBridge builds the function from scratch. For institutions that already have a business but want to scale it, UniBridge steps in to operate and strengthen it, before eventually handing the reins back to the institution. With offices in Pune, Bengaluru, and Gurgaon, the firm now works across marketing strategy, admissions processes, analytics, and technology enablement.

Rejecting Vanity Metrics

Khare's central argument is that higher education has been measuring growth the wrong way for years. Institutions celebrate jumps in admission numbers — say, from 1,000 to 1,500 — without asking the harder questions: What did it cost to acquire those students? Which programmes and markets actually generate profitable demand? What does the overall profit-and-loss picture look like once acquisition costs are factored in?

To fix this, UniBridge maps customer acquisition cost across every channel and programme and ties those numbers directly to an institution's P&L. Khare says this shift — from admission counts to unit economics — is what allows universities to pursue what he calls "growth with sanity." In its engagements so far, UniBridge has helped institutions post admissions or revenue growth of roughly 30 percent, alongside profitability gains of 20 percent or more in some cases.

Where It's Headed

Having worked with more than 200 universities across his career, Khare believes India's higher education ecosystem is at an inflection point. While a handful of leading institutions have already modernised their processes and technology stacks, many others still run largely unstructured, manual systems. UniBridge is now layering AI into university sales operations, including automated follow-up and lead nurturing, alongside its core work on process and infrastructure.

For Khare, the mission is less about promising universities bigger enrolment numbers and more about giving them the systems to understand their own economics — a discipline he believes will define which institutions grow sustainably in an increasingly expensive, competitive market, and which simply generate noise.