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In times when it's all about raising money and burning cash, this com¬pany has taken the path of slow and steady growth on internal accruals. Of course, the numbers can't compare with those of high-octane uni¬corns, but the Image Group has remained largely debt free and profitable for more than 25 years.

Promoter K Kumar began by buying multimedia CD-ROMs kits from Singapore and north India and selling them in Chennai in the 1990s. Then he founded the company that pioneered creative education in India - mul¬timedia, animation and gaming, laced with art and IT.

"Those were the days when even corporate presentations were made using OHP (overhead projector) slides. We had to convince corporates to opt for multimedia kits. Together with CD-ROM drive and sound card, it cost r121aidt We had to train customers to use the hardware and the software kits. That's when the spark to start a company to educate people about multimedia came and 'Image' was born in 1996," recalls Kumar.

In the late 1990s, it even produced an animated series on the Ramayana on CD-ROM and a simulation system to help analyze movement of a crick¬et ball for former Indian cricketer Krish Srikanth ahead of the 1999 Crick¬et World Cup. It joined with RPG for music compression technology lead¬ing to digitization of songs for Saregama Radio. "Those were a few attempts beyond creative education. Otherwise, we kept our focus only on education," says Kumar

In the early 2000s, when the world wide web was getting popular, linage created a curriculum to teach web de¬sign. It became a hit. Then Image turned its attention to art and artists wiith animation and IT in 2003 "Artists knew only net and that too hand drawn. For some reasons they were going through a tough phase then. We designed an animation course to get artists to draw using computer software. This enabled even non-artists to create." says Kumar.