The founder
Hardik Chadda
Founder, Hankernest. Educator first: over ten years of classroom work in three countries. My own words.
Think Inside the Box - Try, Fail, Fix, Learn - Educators before equipment - Fit before ambition - Hardware is the reward - Creativity as a skill - Kept while it happens
The arc
The short version.
- 2016Affordable 3D printers
- 2017Hankernest Technologies
- 2019–21Atal Tinkering Labs
- 2022The pivot
- 2025China, my third country
The beginning
2016: it starts with a printer
In 2016 I was a B.Tech student in Agra. 3D printers were remarkable classroom machines that almost no Indian school could afford, so I built affordable ones.
In 2017 that project became HANKERNEST TECHNOLOGIES PRIVATE LIMITED, registered in Dayalbagh, Agra, where we still are. I thought I was starting a hardware company. I was wrong.
Northern India, and Japan
2019–21: the lab years
From 2019 to 2021 I set up Atal Tinkering Labs across northern India with the Atal Innovation Mission. In 2019 I also taught my first classroom outside India, in Japan.
Those years taught me what no course could: what happens to a school lab after everyone goes home.
What I saw
Watching the labs go quiet
For a few months the lab is the most photographed room in the school. Then the timetable reasserts itself, the teacher in charge goes back to their main subject, and within six months the equipment is stored, not used.
It happened to labs I helped build. Nobody had budgeted for the thing that mattered: a person who could keep the work alive inside a real timetable.
That lesson became the company.
Equipment is bought. Capability is built.
What changed
2022: the pivot
From 2022, Hankernest became what it is now: a company that helps schools teach creativity as a skill. Not labs. Labs get built anyway. Curriculum, teacher capacity, documentation, and the year rhythm that keeps them alive.
That year I also started taking educators out of their schools entirely. In 2025 I taught in China, my third country.
I've taught in classrooms in three countries now. The challenges are different. The thing that works is always the same: a teacher who knows how to make space for thinking.
The record
The credentials, plainly
- B.Tech in Mechanical Engineering and M.Tech in Computer Science, Dayalbagh Educational Institute
- PhD candidate, researching cognitive markers of creative thinking
- Arduino Master Trainer
- Set up Atal Tinkering Labs across northern India with the Atal Innovation Mission, 2019–21
- Classroom teaching in India, Japan (2019), and China (2025)
- Founded Hankernest in 2017; ISO 9001:2015 certified, Startup India recognized
The PhD is not letterhead: my research asks what happens, cognitively, when a student thinks creatively. Everything we design sits on that question.
Hold us to this
What I optimize for
Hold us to one sentence, not to a brochure line: optimize for whether the work is still happening in your school inYear Three, when nobody is watching.
Not the inauguration. Year Three, when the novelty is gone and the coordinator has changed. That is why we train your teachers instead of renting you ours.
Contact
Talk to me
A lab going quiet, a mandate arriving, teachers willing but untrained: the easiest thing is to talk.
You will get a straight answer, including “you don't need us for this”.
- info@hankernest.com
- Visit
- Dayalbagh, Agra, by appointment
- Book a call
- free, 30 minutes for institutions, 15 for educators
- Call or WhatsApp
- +91-7000403607, office hours