Built in Surat.
For schools that actually run on Indian rules.
aCloud is the academic OS from The Imaginations — a Surat-based venture studio that designs, engineers and operates ventures across legal tech, fintech, food, civic tech and education. aCloud is what happens when a team that has shipped products to lawyers, courts, accountants and citizens turns its attention to school trusts.
The Imaginations — a venture studio, not an agency.
The Imaginations was set up in Surat in 2022 to do one specific thing: take a hard, regulatory, India-specific problem and build the full venture around it — product, brand, engineering, sales, operations.
Our portfolio spans Vakalat (legal tech for lawyers and Bar Associations), Legured (citizen legal security), ZeroFIR (AI-drafted FIR + contracts), TaxSum (income tax filing), Kanjusee (lead marketplace), JebKharchi (micro financial assistance), Rajkaran (political tech), Punjab Da Dhaba (food and hospitality), Darjee (fashion for HNIs and NRIs) — and now aCloud (academic management).
A common thread runs through every venture: the regulatory floor is the floor we start from, not the ceiling we hit on the way out.
Indian school trusts deserve software that speaks their language. Not a translation.
The market we saw
A trust with three schools, two boards, twelve thousand students and a single accounts head was running on five products, four Excel files, two WhatsApp groups and one prayer.
The "school ERP" they had bought in 2017 was a single-school product retrofitted to "support" multiple schools through a tenant flag. The fee software was a different vendor. The transport app was a different vendor. The library system was on a different floor.
The decision we made
Not another module. The whole academic operating system. Built around the way a Section 8 trust actually consolidates books, transfers staff, runs RTE, files UDISE+ and answers to a Board of Trustees.
One identity layer. One ledger. One platform. Twenty-three modules. One subscription. India-hosted. India-compliant. Mobile-first for parents, teachers, drivers, principals and trustees.
Five things we don't budge on.
Trust is the unit
The trust runs the schools. The software should mirror that hierarchy. Identity, finance and analytics belong at the trust. Operations belong at the school.
Regulation is product, not paperwork
APAAR, UDISE+, RTE, Form 10B, PoSH, POCSO, DPDPA are not "compliance modules". They are how the school exists. They are wired into core data, not bolted on top.
India-hosted means India-hosted
No cross-border data transfer in normal operation. Mumbai and Hyderabad regions. Data localisation is a feature, not a sales objection to dance around.
Mobile is not a smaller browser
Parents do not visit a portal. Drivers do not refresh a webpage. Teachers do not "log in". Native apps with offline mode are the default. The browser is the admin's tool.
We answer the phone
aCloud onboarding is run by humans. Migration, configuration, training, go-live. For the first academic year we behave as if we are an extension of your office.