Maxme founder Renata Sguario has three tips for Australian SMEs considering India: commit to in-person visits, lead with relationship building and get your partner strategy right.
What’s happening: Melbourne-based edtech company Maxme has built a nationwide presence in India in under two years, signing 16 major partnerships with education institutions and establishing a local company in Noida with five full-time employees and a 25-strong facilitator network.
Why this matters: For Australian small business owners considering international expansion, Maxme’s India story is a practical case study in how to enter a large, complex market with limited resources, the right partnerships and targeted government support.
Renata Sguario had India in her sights before Maxme had a single customer. The Melbourne founder started her human skills development company in 2019 with a clear vision: build a digital platform that helps young people develop the non-technical capabilities they need to thrive in workplaces increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence. Communication, creative thinking, resilience. The skills that automation cannot easily replicate.
“Around 70% of the skills we will need in the age of AI are human skills,” Sguario says, in comments to Austrade. “Our learning platform targets the skills young people need during their final years at school, at university and during the first years of work.”
The platform launched in Australia in 2021. By 2024, Maxme had made India its first international market. By early 2026, it had built what Sguario describes as a nationwide business in under two years.
Human skills in an AI world
Maxme’s platform combines interface design, gamified learning and an accessible price point, a combination Sguario identified early as essential for the market she was targeting. Affordability, she says, is the biggest barrier to rapid uptake of skills learning programs for young people, and pricing the platform accordingly was central to the India strategy from the beginning.
The target market is specific: late secondary school students, final-year university students, teachers and early career workers in their first three to five years of employment. In a country with one of the world’s largest youth populations and a rapidly expanding technology sector, the demand for exactly this kind of upskilling program is significant.
India was always the plan
Sguario’s first corporate visit to India came in January 2023, when she participated in an Austrade program helping Australian technology firms explore new markets. She won the Big Leap Accelerator Stream 2 program, which took her to Delhi, Bengaluru and Hyderabad and introduced her to Austrade’s in-market teams across each city.
That visit set the foundation for what followed. Maxme participated in subsequent Austrade-led delegations including an EdTech mission and the DIDAC mission in 2025, as well as the Festival of Australia, a series of events from November 2024 to June 2025 that showcased Australia’s education offerings across India’s major cities.
“The Festival of Australia was an absolutely incredible series of events that were extremely well organised,” Sguario says. “It gave us significant exposure across all major cities in India. The festival also gave us the opportunity to meet potential clients and the confidence to travel right across the country. The connections we made at the festival have triggered several commercial outcomes.”
Rather than establishing a joint venture, Sguario chose to set up her own limited liability company in India, with Austrade helping identify the right location. Uttar Pradesh, just east of Delhi, offered the incentives she was looking for and Maxme established its Indian entity in Noida.
Building trust before building sales
The decision to put down roots rather than operate at arm’s length reflects a broader principle Sguario has applied throughout the India expansion: in this market, trust in you as a person is a critical success factor, and that trust is built through presence, not pitches.
Today Maxme has five full-time employees in India and a 25-strong network of facilitators that is continuing to grow. The company runs programs across Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai and Delhi, and has signed multiple memoranda of understanding with education institutions that are progressing to implementation.
Recent milestones include a program delivered to a new cohort of students at Kings Cornerstone International College in Chennai and the launch of programs with Ramaiah Academy in Bengaluru. Sguario’s target is four million unique users in India by 2030.
One of the most instructive elements of Maxme’s India strategy is how it positioned itself within an existing ecosystem rather than trying to compete against it. Sguario identified complementary skills providers, many of them focused on technical upskilling, and built Maxme into their offering as the human skills component.
“Some of our partners have platforms that promote technical upskilling,” she says. “We complement what they do with the human upskilling element. We’ve made ourselves a natural ‘bolt on’ to what’s already happening. We are a program multiplier.”
That positioning gave Maxme immediate access to established distribution channels and customer relationships in a market where building those from scratch would have taken years.
Tips for SMEs eyeing export markets
For Australian small business owners considering their own international expansion, Sguario distils her India experience into three practical recommendations, published via Austrade.
The first is to commit to in-person visits. Physical presence in market is what solidifies product market fit and go-to-market strategy in a way that remote research cannot replicate.
The second is to lead with relationship building. Patience and genuine curiosity are essential in markets where trust in the person precedes trust in the product.
The third is to invest in the right partner strategy and make full use of available government support. “It is incredible: here I am, an Australian in India and new to the market; and here is Austrade, willing to help me 24/7 to succeed,” Sguario says. “Austrade has given me the confidence to take Maxme from one end of India to the other.”
For SMEs with global ambitions, Maxme’s trajectory from first visit to nationwide presence in under two years is a practical illustration of what is possible when market entry is planned deliberately, partnerships are chosen strategically and the right support is in place from day one.
This story is based on a case study published by Austrade. All quotes are attributed to Renata Sguario, CEO of Maxme, as published by Austrade.
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