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Thoughts on Sirena

Akshaye/Hari · March 2026

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Hari, I've been sitting with everything you showed me at GITAM for a while. Not because I didn't know what to say — but because the more I thought about it, the more I realized the problem runs deeper than what shows on the surface. And I didn't want to come back with some generic marketing plan that doesn't actually move the needle.

So here's where my head is at. Unfiltered.

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Let's start with the uncomfortable part.

Sirena is 11 years old. You've built real products. You have clients that most startups would put on a billboard — Accenture, Bangalore Airport, Bank of India. You've got a Robotic Lab Center of Excellence at GITAM that most edtech companies would kill for.

And the market doesn't reflect any of that.

That gap — between what Sirena has built and what the market actually sees — is the thing I keep coming back to. And it's clearly not because the product is wrong. It's because there's no system doing the work when you're not in the room. No pipeline, no positioning, no inbound engine, no content that sells on your behalf.

You said something when we met that really stuck with me:

"We've made it hard for people to reach us. Whoever came, we catered."

That one line is the whole diagnosis. That's not a marketing problem at all. That's a go-to-market architecture problem. Different animal entirely.

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And the timing on this couldn't be sharper.

Last month, Galgotias University got thrown out of the India AI Summit for passing off a Chinese-made Unitree robot as their own. The whole country watched. International press covered it. It became this big embarrassment about the gap between India's AI talk and its actual capabilities.

And that's what struck me — because here you are, someone who's actually been building educational robots in India for over a decade. Real R&D, real curriculum, real institutional partnerships. And somehow, that story isn't reaching the people who need to hear it.

That contrast is the opportunity. Right now, every school in the country is going to announce some version of an "AI lab." Most of them will buy off-the-shelf kits from China and call it innovation. Sirena is one of the very few companies that can offer the real thing — built here, with a curriculum, with a university partner, with years of engineering behind it.

But the window matters. While the conversation is loud and the credible players are few — that's when you want to be visible.

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Here's what I think most people would miss about this situation.

The issue isn't just that Sirena doesn't have a marketing team. The deeper issue is that what Sirena does doesn't have a name yet in the market's mind.

Think about it. When a school says "we need a robotics lab," they're not searching for Sirena. They're probably buying some Lego kits and calling it innovation. When a college says "we need an AI program," they're hiring professors, not looking for a turnkey Center of Excellence. The thing you actually offer — integrated robotics infrastructure with curriculum and deployment — people don't even know that's a thing they can buy.

I've been studying the children's and education space closely through some other work, and this pattern keeps showing up: markets don't buy capabilities. They buy named solutions to named problems. HubSpot was just another marketing software company until they named a whole discipline — "inbound marketing" — and suddenly every business needed it. Gainsight did the same thing with "Customer Success" — the function existed inside companies, but until someone named it, nobody was hiring for it or buying tools for it.

Sirena has the same problem. You've built something real. But the market can't find you because it can't name what you offer. And until that changes, every sale will keep depending on someone personally knowing you.

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Now — here's what I think we should do differently.

The typical playbook for a company in your position would be: fix the website, run some LinkedIn ads, make a brochure. And sure, all of that needs to happen eventually. But that's the output, not the thinking. And without the right thinking, those outputs don't do much.

The first question I'd want us to work through is: who are the 4-5 people who need to say yes before a deal closes, and what does each of them need to feel?

Because look — a principal at a premium school in the Middle East is making a completely different decision than a dean at an engineering college in Bangalore. The school principal is buying differentiation. They want to tell parents: our school has a robotics lab powered by an Indian AI company with a Center of Excellence at a major university. That's a status signal. The dean in Bangalore is buying a talent pipeline — they want students to be employable, and they want to tell their board they're partnering with a real robotics company, not just running theory.

Same robot. Same lab. Completely different emotional trigger. Completely different sales conversation.

And then there's the layer underneath.

The education space is full of adults projecting their own anxieties onto children's products. My kid needs to learn coding. My kid needs to be future-ready. Screen time is ruining everything. Every school administrator is carrying some version of this.

The companies that win aren't always the ones with the best product — they're the ones that speak to the right anxiety in the right language. Right now, Sirena doesn't have a narrative that does this. That's what I'd want to build.

That's how I think about these problems. Map the stakeholders, understand the power dynamics in each buying decision, figure out what needs to shift emotionally — and then build the right tools. A pitch, a case study, a demo script, a piece of content. So that when your person walks into that room, the conversation is already halfway there.

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So here's what I'd actually do. Three tracks.

Track One - the SKIP labs and university pipeline. This is the engine.

Someone from my team, on the ground, embedded with yours 3 days a week. Not sitting somewhere making decks. Actually, in the room, understanding the product, talking to your people, and building the sales infrastructure for the Robotic Lab Center of Excellence. I have someone specific in mind for this — Brahm. He's worked at The Ordinary in Canada, understands organic content, sales enablement, and performance marketing deeply, and has been in the trenches with me across multiple accounts here in India. He also comes from a research background in child development — specifically around how children with autism engage with toys and sensory products. So he's not just a marketing person walking into an education company cold. He gets the space — and he's someone I trust completely to represent how I think about work. He's sharp, he gets B2B, and he's ready to commit to this fully.

What that means concretely: positioning for each buyer type, pitch materials, outreach sequences, pipeline tracking. You mentioned the new investors have direct access to schools in Kuwait and Qatar — when those doors open, you want to be ready to walk through them. Not scrambling to put a PDF together. Ready!

GITAM becomes the reference point. Every conversation starts with: "Have you seen what we've built at GITAM? Here's what the students are doing. Here's what the institution got out of it. Here's what it costs. Here's how we set it up." That's a sales tool. Right now, it's just a lab.

The goal for this year isn't to chase 50 universities. It's to build 5 outstanding Centers of Excellence and do them so well that they sell the next 45 for you.

Track Two - your voice. The leverage play.

Hari, I genuinely think you should be the name that comes up when people think about educational robotics in India. You've been building this well before it was trendy. You told me yourself — every 10 years a new wave comes, and you've been riding each one while everyone else was still catching up. That's a genuinely compelling story. And I don't think it's getting the airtime it deserves.

You and I work on this together. Your positioning, building IP around what Sirena stands for — not just as a company, but as a point of view on what robotics in education should look like. The goal: colleges and schools start reaching out because they've seen what you think, what you've built, and what you believe. That's when the sales dynamic flips.

Track Three - vertical robots. The quick win.

Accenture didn't find you through an ad. Bangalore Airport didn't Google "greeting robot." Someone knew someone. That's worked so far. But it doesn't scale.

This vertical is the easiest to systematize. The buyer is clearer, the use case is simpler, the decision cycle is shorter. I can build a repeatable system here — lead gen, a basic funnel, some smart automation — and then your team runs it. This is probably where we see revenue move first while the bigger plays take shape.

On the media and research initiative: I remember you broadly mentioning this, studying where content and media is heading over the next decade, building something around that. I've already started exploring some early ideas with Yamuna on this front. It's a genuinely interesting space. But I'd rather get the engine running first, and let the momentum and the talent we bring together for these three tracks drive where the media direction goes. It deserves proper attention, not a rushed start.

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I'm not coming with a proposal document or a rate card. I'm coming with a point of view on what needs to change and some clear ideas on how to do it.

The model I have in mind is straightforward: Brahm on the ground running execution day-to-day, me on the strategic layer working directly with you.

We can figure out the specifics — rhythm, investment, timelines — over a call.

Can we talk this week? You tell me what's moved on your end since we last spoke, I'll walk you through how I see this playing out.

We'll shape it together.

— Akshaye

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