Entrepreneur profile: Ishani Behl, founder of LYNQ

From UCL international student to founder of a startup that’s now upskilling 30,000 learners a day by simplifying complex financial concepts and regulations: Ishani Behl shares her journey.

5 February 2026

Ishani Behl moved to London from India to pursue an MSc in Education and International Development, after working with the UN in Delhi. Here, she describes how studying at the UCL Institute of Education has been instrumental to the rapid growth of the company she’s scaled in the last 12 months.

“I knew I wanted to pursue my dream of working in global development. So I made the move from my home town Delhi, thousands of miles away, to study my master’s at UCL’s acclaimed Institute of Education (IoE).

Looking back, my entire perspective on learning – and the ideas that have led to me setting up my own education-focused startup – all began to come into focus when I was at UCL. Being part of the IoE, working alongside these incredible professors, made me question everything I thought I knew about learning, and what I could do with it.

Why coming to UCL shifted everything

Coming from India, studying in the UK was a massive change.

I was used to a system still largely focused on rote learning. And, at school, I often found the way many subjects were taught, particularly ones like finance and economics, unnecessarily complicated and obscured with jargon. And I was left feeling ‘less than’ and inadequate, as a result.

Then, during my master’s, I was thrown into this whole new world, and new way of teaching.

I discovered true education isn’t just about how well you know your subject but how well you apply it that matters.

Simplifying learning to maximise results

My business LYNQ is the culmination of everything I’ve learnt about learning so far.

After finishing at UCL in 2022, I set up LYNQ - a unique sales and compliance predictive risk system that lies at the intersection of learning, artificial intelligence and risk prediction. We work with large finance multinationals in the global south to predict risk behaviour through the way their employees learn.

We do this by drawing on the deep knowledge of subject experts within each business, and then breaking complex topics down into short, easily digestible multilingual mobile learning modules for their sales and compliance teams.

The result is hugely simplified learning. Learning that not only empowers employees to do their jobs better but also allows them to have far greater impact on risk mitigation and revenue.

Lightbulb moments

I can pinpoint several moments at UCL when the seeds for LYNQ were being sown.

I was super lucky to work with Professor Chris Yates, and he taught me this line that really stuck with me: "When challenge becomes a threat, learning stops". That was my lightbulb ‘fork in the road’. That's when I truly started learning for real.

I was also introduced to analogy-driven learning, and suddenly I understood all kinds of complex concepts in a different way.

I wasn't just doing better academically, I began generating new ideas from my studies and applying it across different disciplines, and it was then that I started exploring the idea of launching my own startup.

I started with a different business idea, for a sustainability network and marketplace called Sustainr, which I set up with help from the UCL Entrepreneurship Society. Although on paper that venture failed, it was an important test bed for my ideas.

Later I took part in one of UCL’s brilliant extracurricular entrepreneurship programmes, run by UCL Innovation & Enterprise at BaseKX, UCL’s dedicated entrepreneurship hub. That programme gave me the confidence to pitch, to accept myself and, most importantly, to be proud of being a business builder.

Helping learners master complex concepts faster

Information overload is costing economies 900 billion dollars, and employees are being asked to wade through hour-long modules on complex business topics in a language they often don’t understand.

So we’re working hard to change that, combining new technologies with proven education techniques that help concepts stick. At the same time, we're helping predict risk behaviour to prevent mis-selling and other risks in the finance industry.

Our bite-sized online modules are helping learners master concepts 30 times faster than they did before. Most importantly, after sales teams complete our training, they get better results because they understand what they’re selling and why.

This immediate, week-on-week quantifiable change in efficiency, skills gap reduction and risk mitigation is the clearest proof that our methodology works, and it’s what I’m most proud of.

Be curious, think big

My advice to any aspiring entrepreneurs would be to question everything and become very, very curious during your studies. Secondly, try not to be constrained by how you think business or startups need to work.

Rather than chasing capital, why not focus on making it instead, and try to generate some revenue from day one? I started LYNQ with zero funds, and within a year we were profitable and working with large multinationals, impacting over 30,000 employees in the global south. So if I can make something big happen, maybe you could, too?”