On a sultry evening in a middle-class Indian home, a familiar scene plays out. A child cries. The pressure cooker whistles. A phone light comes on. And in that small, chaotic gap between exhaustion and urgency, a parent makes a choice that millions of others make every day: They hand over a screen.
For most, this feels like a relief. But for Nikita Prakash Akhara, a resident of Pune, this seemed like a question. During her pregnancy, she began reading extensively about parenting. This question remained in his mind after the birth of his daughter in 2022. “What is it really doing to my child’s brain?” he remembers asking himself.
That uncomfortable, inconvenient and deeply personal question would ultimately lead him to launch BrainTots in 2023, a Pune-based early childhood development brand that positions itself not just as a toy company, but as something even more ambitious – a “parenting operating system” for India’s youngest generation.
A problem that doesn’t seem like it
India is in the midst of a quiet transformation. Screens are everywhere – in living rooms, strollers and dining tables. Increasingly, they are also in the hands of children who cannot speak yet.
As per global and Indian pediatric guidelines, children under two years of age should not be exposed to screens. Yet the reality is completely different. In urban India, children are spending hours every day on mobile devices, often leaving parents to balance the invisible labor of work, home and child care.
What makes this trend worrying, experts say, is not just the time spent on screens, but also the space the screens take up. During the early years of life, a baby’s brain develops through interaction – eye contact, babbling, pointing, and responding. Scientists call it “serve and return”: A child calls out, a parent responds. Repeated thousands of times, this loop forms the foundation of language, cognition, and emotional regulation.
“A screen doesn’t work and doesn’t come back on. It responds, but doesn’t connect,” says Nikita.
He realized that that difference was everything.
Braintotes didn’t start in a boardroom or pitch deck. It started late at night in a house with a tired mother trying to do better.
“I wasn’t thinking of building a company, I was just trying to parent without the use of screens,” says Nikita.
Like many new parents, she found herself overwhelmed by an endless stream of conflicting advice and information that told her what was right but rarely showed how to put it into practice.
“I didn’t need a lot of information,” she says. “On a bad day, I needed something I could do in five minutes.”
That insight became the foundation of Braintotes – 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 nutritional care model – Nikita noticed a recurring pattern.
“In every reliable thing, the same basic ideas kept being repeated,” she says. “Excitement. Interaction. Repetition. Progression. Comfort.”
They 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 baby starts to lift his head during tummy time, he starts to develop the muscles he’ll need to crawl. So I designed the Rainbow Wheel with this in mind. It’s kept just out of baby’s reach.
“She will lift her head and reach for the rainbow wheel with one hand, turning it as she stretches. This helps develop her core muscles as she moves and slowly progresses to crawling.”
Another bestseller is the Number Peg Board, designed for children aged around 2 years.
“Around the age of two, a child stops just repeating numbers and wants to count real things with his or her hands. That’s the moment for which I designed the Numbers Peg Board. It’s a simple wooden set – ten small boards with numbers from 1 to 10, held together by a set of thick wooden pegs.
“The child reads the number, then places several pegs on the board – one peg for 1, two pegs for 2, and so on. As her fingers pick up each peg and press into it, two things move together: She learns what the number actually means, not just how it sounds, and her pincer grip becomes stronger – the same grip she’ll need later to hold a pencil. It’s one of our bestsellers, and it’s the toy that parents tell me their kids keep coming back to.”
Made in India for Indian homes
What sets this brand apart is not just its design philosophy, but also its understanding of Indian homes.
Every product is designed, tested and manufactured in India. Materials like birch, beech and neem wood are selected not only for safety but also for familiarity. The size, weight and durability are well suited for Indian homes.
Nikita develops the designs while the manufacturing work is outsourced to specialist producers across the country. Some work with cloth, some with wood. The finished products reach Pune, where they are stored in their home basements before being shipped to customers.
More importantly, this system is built around the realities of Indian parenting.
“This is not a Scandinavian nursery with unlimited time and space, this is a home where grandma has a say, a helper is involved, and the parents are tired,” she says.
From living room to market
What started as a personal experiment has turned into a growing business.
Their first customer was a friend who purchased an early learning kit for babies aged 0-4 months. Since then, Braintotes has expanded to major e-commerce platforms and has built a portfolio of approximately 150 products. Bootstrapped company now eyeing projected revenues ₹Rs 3 crore in the coming financial year.
Unlike many consumer startups, Braintotes has not raised venture capital.
“We invested ₹25 lakhs initially. “We wanted to get the product right before we scaled,” says Nikita. “If it goes wrong, it’s not something you just fix in the next sprint.”
However, the company has received institutional recognition. It received a grant from Dettol (Reckitt) and is currently part of an Anganwadi pilot program – a move that could take its methodology beyond urban homes into grassroots child care systems.
For Nikita, that change is necessary.
“The screen problem is not limited to one classroom or one city,” she says. “It’s everywhere.”
Competing with the world’s most powerful product
Ask Nikita about competition, and he doesn’t start with other toy companies.
“Our biggest competitor is the phone,” she says.
This is a surprising but realistic assessment. Smartphones are ubiquitous, effectively free at the time of use, and designed by some of the world’s best engineers to capture attention. For exhausted parents, they are often the easiest solution.
Braintotes isn’t trying to erase that reality. Instead, it hopes to provide parents with an easier option in those difficult moments.
The book that became a movement
While toys are the company’s most visible product, its most impressive offering may be a book.
The Daily Parenting Toolkit (0-3 years) breaks down the BrainTots philosophy into six practical systems covering routines, meals, sleep, play, and screen replacement strategies.
Its reception has surprised the founders.
Customers rarely rate it as informative. They call it a relief.
Nikita believes that emotional response represents the company’s true product-market fit.
“Parents don’t need to tell them they’re doing something wrong,” she says. “They need to show what to do instead.”
a different kind of growth
Looking ahead, Braintotes is preparing to raise its first institutional funding round ₹Rs 2 crore to scale up manufacturing, expand distribution and create a digital collaboration platform.
Even as the company grows, Nikita insists that it will stick to its core philosophy.
“No vanity metrics,” she says. “Every buck should get us closer to replacing screen time with real conversations.”
The long-term ambition is to become the default early childhood development system in Indian homes and, ultimately, to become a global reference point for screen-free parenting.
a founder’s conviction
At the heart of Braintotes is not just a product, but a perspective.
Nikita does not present herself as an expert lecturing to parents. She presents herself as one of them.
“I stand exactly where they stand,” she says.
With her co-founder and husband, Amol Andite, who brings expertise in the FMCG and consumer markets, the company operates with a clear division of roles: one creates the product, the other helps it reach parents.
Ultimately, Braintots isn’t trying to reinvent parenting. It’s trying to change a moment – that moment when parents want something, anything, to make life easier.
If that moment changes even slightly, the impact can be profound.
