On 20 November at Taj West End, Bengaluru, 75 education owners with live campus projects sit down one to one with the practices whose work fits what they are building. No pitching. No stalls. Nobody bought their way onto your calendar. And 34 of the 50 practice seats are already gone.
Representation at the edition or partner network. Not an endorsement.
Sick of being called in after the PMC has already shortlisted three practices, none of them yours?
Fed up with fee negotiations that start from the number the last architect accepted?
The trustee decides to build. Before he calls a single architect, he asks the WhatsApp group of school owners. Three names come back. One is the brother in law of a board member. One built a school in 2014. One is you, if you are lucky, and only if somebody in that group has heard of you. He meets all three, picks on gut and fee, and the drawings start. By the time the project is public, the appointment is eleven months old.
Every campus has six appointments to make, and the architect is the first. Which means the window where your work can actually be considered is the shortest of all of them. It closes quietly, in a family sitting room, before anyone outside it knows the project exists.
So practices do what they can. They sponsor a conference and get four minutes on stage in front of two hundred people who have no project. They answer RFPs written around a competitor's concept. They pay a BD person to cold call trusts who do not take calls. None of that puts you in the room while the decision is still open. Expand does exactly one thing. That.
EduInfra spent six months finding education owners who are building right now. New campuses, expansions, redevelopments, India entries by international universities. Not the ones who might build one day. The ones with land, a board decision and a timeline. That is the 75 owners in the room. Not the 75 who registered. The 75 who passed.
Then it is filtered to you. You complete a Practice Passport: discipline, project types, the stage you enter, geographies, scale, and the three to five projects that show your fit. When the marketplace opens three weeks before the day, you see only the projects at your stage, in your geography, that still need what you do. A concept stage K12 campus in Hosur that has not appointed an architect. Not a hostel block already at tender.
A meeting only exists when both sides said yes. The owner sees why your work is relevant to his project. You see the project context. Nobody pitches to a line of strangers, and no owner can be lobbied onto your calendar. Your work speaks first. The meeting happens second.
No pitching. No portfolios on a stall. Just projects, at the stage where you still matter.
Every conference puts you in front of an owner at stage six, when the architect was appointed a year ago and the only thing left to sell him is a lighting consultant. Expand puts you into the project at stages one to four, while the appointment is still open.
Names, sites and budgets stay masked until both sides say yes. The shape of the work does not.
Project information is not an open lead list. You see type, stage, geography, scale and open requirements. Institution and site are revealed when both sides accept a conversation. That protects the owner. It also protects you, because nobody can lobby around you.
From Kempegowda airport through Devanahalli, Kundana, Doddaballapura and KWIN City. Harrow, Stonehill and Vidyashilp already open. Chanakya, Amity, GITAM and Ramaiah's ITIR campus already running. And sixteen institutions proposed at KWIN City alone, from Dayananda Sagar, PES and KLE to National Law School and an IISc presence. Every one of them is a masterplan, a design team and a specialist ecosystem still to be appointed.
Corridor data compiled by EduInfra from public announcements. Proposed institutions are at planning stage and are not confirmed participants. The owners in the room come from across India.
The ratio is three owners to two practices to one supplier. Add a fifty first practice and every owner in the room meets one more architect, and one fewer project gets a proper conversation. The number is fixed. It protects the practices already in it.
Selected confirmed organisations, as published by EduInfra. The list grows as registrations complete.
EduInfra Connect, Mumbai, 17 March 2026, Jio Convention Centre.
The format is intense, and the room is exactly right. The entire education operator ecosystem, primary and secondary, with developers, architects and service providers in one room.
The event uniquely brought education organisations and real estate developers together, enabling interactions and understanding collaborations.
Vibrant. It brought investors, operators and service providers together.
Well curated, with great networking and valuable insights from both the higher education and K12 sectors.
A platform to connect with industry peers, investors and partners, with valuable insights into the future of education.
Insightful discussions on the future of education infrastructure, valuable data, and networking with leading professionals across the sector.
EduInfra Expand is curated by AlphaGamma Market Ventures, the team behind the EduInfra Series: Circle, Forums, Connect, Expand and Scale, one audience, the people planning, funding, designing, building and operating education infrastructure in India. Ganesh Babu, Founder and Chief Editor, curates every one of the 150 seats personally. Not a registration desk. A person, deciding who gets in.
So the fair question is not what does the seat cost. It is what would it cost my practice to reach the same owners at the same stage.
| An Architect & Consultant seat includes | Arranged independently |
|---|---|
| Six months of owner side curation, already done. 75 live projects found, qualified and profiled by stage before you arrive. Compare: one BD associate for six months. | ₹2,40,000+ |
| Three weeks of stage filtered project briefs. Only the projects that still need your discipline, in your geography, before you meet anyone. | ₹60,000+ |
| Up to 8 double opt in conversations with owners whose projects are at the stage you enter. | ₹1,20,000+ |
| A Practice Passport the curation team builds with you. Your discipline, stage, geography and best work, in the form owners actually read. | ₹25,000 |
| The 25 specialist partners in the room, vetted for six months, for your next specification. | Not purchasable |
| A room of 49 peer practices and PMCs bidding on the same market this year. | Not purchasable |
| Documented follow ups you act on the following Monday. | ₹20,000 |
| Indicative cost of doing this yourself | ₹4,65,000+ |
Independent figures are indicative market ranges for comparable business development, project intelligence and profiling work. Shown to frame the decision, not as a quotation.
Plus 18% GST. One seat. One Practice Passport. One day in front of the owners, not their gatekeepers.
CHECK IF MY PRACTICE QUALIFIES →Eight conversations with owners whose projects are at your stage is ₹3,750 per conversation. Now price the last eight first meetings your BD person got you, including the three that turned out to be at tender. Eight relevant conversations for ₹30,000 is not the expensive option.
At a 3 percent design fee, one ₹40 crore campus is a ₹1.2 crore appointment. ₹30,000 is a quarter of one percent of that single fee, and it is the only line in your BD budget that puts you in the room before the decision is made.
EduInfra also runs a curated programme: five one to one project conversations built around the assignments, stages and geographies your practice wants, at ₹2.25 lakh plus GST, with the matching work done by the team before the marketplace opens. Most practices start with the ₹30,000 seat, see the marketplace, then decide. If you upgrade, the full ₹30,000 is adjusted against the programme. Nothing is lost by starting small.
The marketplace opens three weeks before 20 November. You log in and see the projects matched to your discipline, stage and geography.
If there are fewer than five relevant project briefs for your practice, tell us, and we refund the seat in full. Every rupee, GST included.
You find out in October, at your desk, before you have booked a flight. No forms. No arguments. The only way you lose ₹30,000 is if you see five or more relevant projects and decide not to meet the owners.
Why we can offer that. Because the room is built from the owners' projects outward, and we will not sell a seat to a practice we cannot match. And to be plain about what this is not: it is a guarantee that you will see relevant projects. It is not a promise of an appointment. Nobody honest can promise you that, and the owners would not come if we tried.
The ratio is three to two to one. Seventy five owners, fifty practices, twenty five suppliers. Add a fifty first practice and every owner is meeting one more architect, and the room starts to look like every other conference. So the number is fixed, it is not a marketing device, and when the last seat goes the room closes.
There are 16 seats left as of today. Selling closes when they are gone or on 31 October, whichever comes first, because the marketplace needs three weeks to run before the day.
Seven questions and your details. No payment, no call booked, no obligation. At the end you will be told plainly whether a seat makes sense, and if it does not, we will say so.
Fifty of those seats belong to practices whose work will be considered before the appointment is made. 34 are taken. If you are one of the rest, the ninety second check above is the only thing between you and knowing.
CHECK IF MY PRACTICE QUALIFIES →P.S. Read the guarantee again. You see the project briefs three weeks before you travel. Fewer than five relevant ones, full refund, GST included, no argument. So the decision is not "should I spend ₹30,000." It is "should I find out, for free, whether the campuses that still need an architect this year are already in this room." Put that way, there is only one answer.