Physics Wallah democratizes education for millions with MongoDB Atlas

INTRODUCTION

Founded in 2014, Physics Wallah has evolved from a YouTube Channel that offered free educational content into one of India’s educational technology (edtech) giants. Following a successful IPO in November 2025, the company is now publicly listed on both the Bombay and National Stock Exchanges. With 5.3 million students (paid-users) and a 142 million online student community, Physics Wallah is on a mission to democratize quality education and improve learning outcomes for students across India.

To power its rapid growth and massive scale, Physics Wallah relies on MongoDB Atlas. With MongoDB, the company built a high-performance data architecture that can handle millions of concurrent learners across multiple channels while improving student engagement. MongoDB has also given the company a strong foundation for an ambitious AI-driven future.

THE CHALLENGE

Building for scale and data complexity

In 2020, Physics Wallah decided to expand its offerings beyond YouTube. The company was on a mission to build a comprehensive learning and test-preparation platform to help more students prepare for key higher education exams—including IIT-JEE and NEET, India’s most prominent national-level entrance examinations, which serve as gateways to careers in engineering and medicine.

Additionally, Physics Wallah wanted to provide students with a comprehensive learning experience that includes both online and offline centres across the country. 

This ambitious growth plan came with some challenges:

• Scale: Physics Wallah needed a platform that could handle traffic spikes during batch launches and live classes, such as when hundreds of thousands of students join simultaneously.
• Cross-platform synchronization and data complexity: The company operates across multiple platforms, including web portals, apps, YouTube, and offline centres. The platform also needs to handle diverse datasets, including student information, course content and educational resources, engagement analytics, practice and assessment data, and real-time data for doubt resolution and interactions.
• High availability and disaster recovery: Ensuring continuous access to data and zero downtime was critical—any outage could disrupt/hamper the learning experience of thousands of students who joined live.
• Search and indexing: As Physics Wallah’s data grew, performing efficient searches across vast question banks and educational content—particularly full-text search and OCR (Optical Character Recognition) integrations—became an important feature.

“Our platform needs to handle text-based content, multimedia resources, question banks, and dynamic updates across platforms,” said Avinash Gupta, Senior Director of Engineering at Physics Wallah. “From the get-go, we knew we needed a data platform that could provide mission-critical availability, and the flexibility to accommodate evolving data schemas without the restrictions of traditional SQL databases.”

OUR SOLUTION

MongoDB Atlas: a unified data platform for continued growth

Physics Wallah initially built its platform on MongoDB Community Edition. MongoDB’s flexible document model immediately enabled greater scale and the ability to handle a variety of channels and data sources.

But as the company’s platform quickly grew, the team realized it needed to move beyond a self-hosted model: “Whether it’s accommodating scale, new data formats, new online and offline channels, or getting ready for AI, one thing was clear: we need a data platform able to evolve with us,” said Gupta.

In 2021, Physics Wallah migrated to MongoDB Atlas, hosted on AWS, which kicked off the company’s move to a microservices architecture. Today, Physics Wallah has over 90 microservices powered by MongoDB Atlas, allowing it to scale individual services independently based on demand.

With MongoDB Atlas, Physics Wallah built a multi-region architecture aimed at near-zero downtime and maintaining business continuity. Built-in features like observability, auto index creation, and query performance analysis allow the company’s engineering team to troubleshoot issues effectively and to optimize database performance.

MongoDB Search, another built-in capability within MongoDB Atlas, was instrumental in improving personalization for students. For example, Physics Wallah used MongoDB Search to build a feature allowing students to upload images of handwritten questions, which are then converted using OCR and searched against a large question bank, providing instant access to relevant learning materials.

OUTCOME

Fast growth, greater student engagement, and an AI-ready future

Physics Wallah is now facilitating "mega classrooms" where up to 200,000 students can attend in real-time, and millions can watch recordings later at their convenience. Physics Wallah’s platform handles more than 1,000 classes and 2,000 video uploads every day to help its 5.3 million students (paid users) learn and prepare for highly competitive and potentially life-changing exams.

MongoDB Atlas enables Physics Wallah to manage vast amounts of academic materials tailored to different student segments. It also powers students’ personalized analytics and learning stats dashboards. These ultimately drive higher student engagement—with an average of 90 to 120 minutes spent on the app daily—as well as improve learning experiences and testing outcomes.

AI is a primary focus area for Physics Wallah, as the company explores how AI-driven models can help it further grow and deepen student engagement, ultimately aiming to make the learning experience better. As part of this, Physics Wallah is currently running a POC for MongoDB Vector Search.

“With MongoDB’s built-in vector search capabilities, we could consolidate our infrastructure and move to a unified vector search solution, rather than managing separate vector search databases,” said Gupta. “Working with MongoDB gives us the confidence to keep building our offering, including with AI-driven innovations, and deliver on our promise to make education more accessible all across India.”