Agency
Skills, relationships and confidence: the ability to use technology and to shape your own working life.
About NLightN Foundation
No talent should go to waste for want of a path.
NLightN Foundation is a Section 8 not-for-profit company in India. We bring manufacturing, skill building and AI together, so that young people can build skilled careers, and so that industry can build a workforce as diverse as the country.
Our vision
An India where every young person who wants to build things has the skills, the confidence and the opportunity to do it, and where industry's workforce reflects the full diversity of the nation.
Our mission
To prepare young people for skilled manufacturing careers through field programmes powered by AI-native learning, to help companies use AI to train, include and grow their people, and to help NGOs and their leaders put AI to work.
How we create change
Agency. Presence. Influence.
Skills open the door. Real change comes when people can use them, are seen and heard where decisions are made, and when what works shapes how others work too.
Presence
A place in the workplaces and platforms that shape people's lives, including for the groups that have been left out of them.
Influence
Evidence and partnership that shape practice and policy, in companies, in the skilling system and beyond it.
Our story
Many threads, one shop floor.
We did not start in manufacturing. We started in classrooms, in foundations and in health programmes, and found that everything we had learned met on the factory floor.
Where we began
Education and AI
Our founders spent more than a decade in school education and in building AI applications for learning, including Outscore.in, a learning and assessment platform for students and teachers.
AI for the social sector
Tools for foundations and NGOs
We helped donor foundations and charities put AI to work: an HR assistant, a grant-making app, nurse triage, health analytics, and a public database of industrial accidents. Today we share what we learned through our AI consulting and training for NGOs and their leaders.
Language and confidence
6,000 voices
A spoken-English app for 6,000 scholarship students in rural India, and an English programme for housekeeping staff, taught us that confidence is half of every skill.
Now
Skills for manufacturing
India's factories need skilled people, and AI can now teach real processes, in Indian voices, on a phone. In 2026 we built our first shop-floor courses, for a cohort of women trainees joining a hydraulic-cylinder plant.
What we believe
Six values we build on.
Dignity of work
Shop-floor careers are skilled careers. We teach them with the respect and the rigour they deserve.
Inclusion by design
We start with the people most often left out, and design for them from the first day.
Evidence over anecdote
We measure what learners understood and where they went next, not just who attended.
Responsible AI
AI supports trainers; it does not replace them. We collect only the data we need, and voice recordings are never stored.
Built for India
Phone-first, light on data, and spoken in Indian voices, because that is how most of India learns.
Partnership
We work with funders, employers, institutes and communities. Nobody builds a workforce alone.
Our team
The people behind the light.
Sreekanth Sreedharan
Co-founder & CEO
Sreekanth has a background in technology, with an engineering degree in computer science and years at TCS, where he saw the potential of technology for social purpose. His business education at IIM Ahmedabad and his time as co-founder of Iksula instilled a start-up spirit: taking on challenges in a structured way and staying hopeful.
He then spent more than a decade on school education at CSR@Wipro and the Azim Premji Foundation, which created a strong desire to take education to more and more people. A B.Tech from the College of Engineering, Thiruvananthapuram, he has spent more than 6,000 hours building AI applications and is a pioneer in using AI for educational good.
To him, equality may be a lofty dream, but removing the everyday inequalities in front of us is doable in our lifetime. He is a strong supporter of the National Education Policy 2020.
Sreenath Manickom
Co-founder & COO
Sreenath brings deep expertise in generative AI applications, quality assurance and user experience. With more than 15 years at Volvo across India and the US, he specialises in generative AI application development, quality assurance and operational excellence.
His focus on user experience keeps the tools we use intuitive and effective for learners and trainers alike. He is an expert in turning client requirements into user-centred design.
Join us
We are building field teams, curriculum designers and engineers. If you want to help build India's next workforce, we would love to hear from you.
Governance
A not-for-profit by law, and by design.
NLightN Foundation is registered as a not-for-profit company under Section 8 of the Companies Act, 2013. Any income is applied only to our objects, and no dividend is paid to members.
We are glad to share our registration and compliance documents with funders and partners. Just ask.
Want to build this with us?
Fund a cohort, hire our learners, bring a programme to your institute, or lend your skills.