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 begin in boardrooms but 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. He quickly realised there was more margin in making sweets than reselling packaged products – a decisive shift 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 converted them into customers for higher-margin sweets. At a time when most sweet shops kept trays open on dusty counters, he opted for an enclosed, fan-cooled shop and a modern, aspirational English name — Lovely.
The next generation, led by Pratham’s father, Dr. Ashok Mittal, scaled that mindset into Lovely Professional University (LPU), one of India’s most recognisable private universities.
For Pratham, childhood meant growing up between small-shop frugality and the massive architecture of a university ecosystem. Counting cash at the counter and watching a university grow became his first business school.
From Wharton to Neta App: Experiments in Systems
At the Wharton School, Mittal found himself in an environment where building companies between classes was normal. Students weren’t just studying entrepreneurship; they were practising it. That shaped his view of what meaningful education should look like.
During this time, he co-founded Outgrow with Randy Rayess — a SaaS platform enabling businesses to create interactive calculators, quizzes and tools to capture leads. It scaled globally and taught him how rapidly products and user expectations shift.
Back in India, he turned toward civic-tech with Neta App, a platform where citizens could rate elected representatives — essentially a public report card. Millions used it before it was eventually wound down, but it left Mittal with one strong belief: well-designed systems influence behaviour faster than policy debates.
That thinking naturally extended to higher education.
“We’re a Business That Teaches Business”
By 2020, Mittal had concluded that business schools had fallen behind in a world where every company is now a tech company. Fixed syllabi, heavy infrastructure and old-style faculty models looked outdated.
Masters’ Union was his answer — a practitioner-led business school anchored by its flagship PGP in Technology and Business Management (PGP-TBM).
Instead of long lectures, students work on live projects, build startups, run investment portfolios and learn directly from founders, CXOs and investors. The curriculum is deliberately flexible and updated based on what the market demands.
Operationally too, Masters’ Union runs like a startup. Instead of spending hundreds of crores on a campus, the institution leases space in a DLF corporate park in Gurugram — turning a fixed cost into a variable model while giving students daily exposure to real businesses.
Faculty is practitioner-first. The school uses a rotating pool of industry operators instead of tenured academics, ensuring a continuous flow of real-time insights from fintech, D2C, capital markets and AI-focused industries.
Scaling a School Like a Portfolio of Startups
Inside Masters’ Union, each major programme operates like an independent business unit with its own “mini-CEO.” These leaders manage budgets, outcomes and student experiences, allowing experimentation while maintaining ownership.
The early days demanded trust. With no alumni and no placement history, the founding team personally called thousands of aspirants. Sixty students took the leap — the “Super 60.” Their success became the school’s first marketing engine.
Masters’ Union has grown on surprisingly lean spend. The annual marketing budget, including salaries, remains under Rs 5 crore — far lower than traditional MBA institutions. Instead of mass advertising, it focuses on high-signal experiences, a distinct campus identity and strong content-driven storytelling, especially via LinkedIn.
More than 60% of recent admissions come through alumni and word-of-mouth — a benchmark even older institutions envy.
The Harder Question: Can This Model Scale Without Losing Its Edge?
As Masters’ Union expands its offerings, experiments with undergraduate programmes and explores new formats, the challenge shifts from whether the model works to whether it can stay sharp at scale.
The institution’s answer lies in system design: asset-light infrastructure, practitioner-first teaching, decentralised leadership and a strong culture that rewards “intrapreneurs,” autonomy and low-toxicity environments.
Whether that bet pays off will depend on placements, alumni success and how well the model navigates regulatory and competitive pressures.
What’s clear is that in a sector defined by legacy campuses and billboard-driven branding, Masters’ Union is choosing to compete on how it fundamentally rethinks the playbook for business education.
