Sanjay Laul grew up without a father, a mentor, or a business plan. He watched people wait for hours
outside immigration offices he couldn’t afford to walk into. Two decades later, he built the infrastructure
that moves over a million students across 30+ countries. This is not a success story. It’s something more
complicated than that.
Published June 2026
There is a queue Sanjay Laul still thinks about.
He was in Delhi, late 1990s, no money, no plan, accompanying a cousin who wanted to immigrate to
Canada. Outside the immigration consultancy, people waited three, sometimes four hours just to get
inside. Laul watched them from the street. He couldn’t afford to emigrate himself. But standing there,
he had a thought that would take him the better part of two decades to fully answer: what if, instead of
waiting in this line, I ran the office?
He did not run the office that day. He didn’t run anything that day. But the question stayed with him.
LUCKNOW, GRADE EIGHT, AND NO SAFETY NET
Laul grew up in Lucknow. His father died when he was in grade eight. No income came in after that. No
family business to inherit, no mentor to point the way, no roadmap of any kind. His mother, a homemaker, held the house together while the neighbourhood watched and waited for the family to fail.
He was, by his own admission, a below-average student. But he was never going to take a job. He knew
that much. The question was what to do instead, and for a long time, he had no good answer.
After completing his engineering in Navi Mumbai, he came back to Lucknow and opened a ready-made
garment shop in front of his home, at his mother’s suggestion. It didn’t work. Over the next ten to
twelve years, he moved through one small venture after another. None of them lasted. He had no real
understanding of finance. He ran everything on gut instinct and optimism, which is a poor substitute for
a working business model. The pressure was constant. Relatives asked his mother, with barely disguised
sarcasm, what exactly her son was doing now. What he was doing, mostly, was failing. And, without knowing it, learning how to read patterns insystems that other people took for granted.
THE QUEUE, THE PIVOT, AND RS. 3,000
Eventually, his search for something that would work brought him to Gujarat. He partnered with cousins
and friends to start an immigration consulting firm. The first two months passed with no clients.
Partners left, one by one, until he was alone. He didn’t have money for petrol. He had an office, a phone,
and no particular reason for optimism. Then his first client walked in. A visitor visa case. The fee was Rs. 3,000. He doesn’t tell this story as a triumph. He tells it as evidence. Three years after that first Rs. 3,000, he had built a network of immigration offices across Gujarat. Not because he had discovered some secret
about the business, but because he stayed when everyone else left, and he kept showing up when there
was no obvious reason to.
In 2003, Canada revised its permanent residency rules. The immigration pipeline Laul had built his
business around started to look shaky. He could have waited to see what happened. Instead, he pivoted
into education consulting. That decision, made under pressure, turned out to be the most consequential
of his career. In 2005, he launched Kampus Landing, his first overseas education consultancy, based out of
Ahmedabad. He ran it for nearly a decade. He learned how the international education market worked
at ground level, not from reports, but from the agents, the students, and the institutions who told him,
directly, what was broken.
“Talent is evenly distributed. Opportunity is not.”
— Sanjay Laul
BUILDING MSM UNIFY: BRITISH COLUMBIA, NOT A PITCH DECK
MSM Unify was incorporated in British Columbia, Canada, in 2012, and formally launched in 2013. It did
not begin as an AI platform or a marketplace or any of the things it has since become. It began as a
service business: a team that understood how to recruit international students, build institutional
partnerships, and manage the relationship between universities and the agent networks that feed them.
The early years were not defined by rapid growth. They were defined by something less glamorous:
credibility. Institutions were cautious about new partnerships. India’s potential as a sending market had
not yet been fully recognized by global universities. Laul chose depth over speed.
One of the early proofs of concept came through Northern Lights College in Fort St. John, British
Columbia. MSM Unify brought a steady pipeline of international students to a community that most
recruiters had never thought to serve. Those students didn’t just fill seats. They supported housing
demand, contributed to local businesses, and in some cases stayed on after graduation. The model that
emerged, local execution with centralized reporting and quality control, became MSM Unify’s core competitive advantage.
“Rather than focusing on rapid expansion, I concentrated on solving real-time problems. The Northern Lights College relationship validated our approach and laid the foundation for future growth. We stayed disciplined and focused on delivering value consistently.” — Sanjay Laul
Laul moved his family to Vancouver in 2014. He had received his first passport at 26, not knowing at the
time what a visa was. His first international trip was to Malaysia. By the time he settled in Canada, he had visited enough countries to understand something most education companies miss: that trust is not scalable in the way that technology is scalable. It has to be built market by market, relationship by relationship, in the language and context of the place.
WHAT MSM UNIFY IS NOW
Fourteen years in, MSM Unify is considerably bigger than most outside the industry understand. The
numbers tell part of it.
1M+ students impacted
30+ countries of operation
6,000+ verified recruitment agents in the network
1,500+ partner campuses globally
60,000+ courses on the platform
US$300M+ in tuition revenue enabled
1,000+ professionals on the team
The platform today functions as an AI-integrated marketplace connecting students, institutions, and recruitment partners. It handles guidance, applications, visa navigation, accommodation, and post-arrival support, the full chain that a student has to navigate, on a single platform. MSM Unify also acts as a global marketing and regional representative office for overseas institutions, managing branding, agent engagement, school outreach, pre-departure orientation, and post-landing support in every market it operates in.
The platform is AIRC certified, a standard that matters for US institutional partnerships and signals a level of compliance infrastructure that most competitors in the space haven’t built.
“We wanted to create a platform that could solve all of these problems. MSM Unify was designed as an AI-powered marketplace where students, institutions and agents could interact more efficiently. Our objective was to simplify this complex journey and create better outcomes for everyone.”
— Sanjay Laul
WHAT HE ACTUALLY BELIEVES ABOUT EDUCATION
Spend time with Laul’s public commentary and a few consistent arguments emerge. They are not motivational. They are operational. The first is about access. Most platforms in international education are built on the premise that connecting a student to a list of universities solves the problem. Laul’s view is that access without navigation is insufficient. Getting a student to a list is easy. Getting them through the application, the visa, the transition, and into a career at the other end, that requires a different kind of infrastructure. One built on relationships and trust, not just technology.
The second is about what education is actually for. In his view, the question that international students are really asking is not which university has the best research rankings. They are asking: what does my life look like at 28? Post-study work rights, in his framing, are the real ranking system for international education. Countries that have figured out how to sequence study rights, post-graduation work rights, and residency pathways, Germany’s model is the example he returns to most often, are winning the competition for international students. Countries that have treated education and immigration as separate policy domains are losing it.
“Mobility should translate into public value: employable graduates, industry-aligned curricula, knowledge partnerships in both directions.”
— Sanjay Laul, November 2025
The third is about what the ecosystem actually is. In most EdTech framing, the platform is the product.
Laul’s argument is that the platform is just the interface. The product is the ecosystem: the 6,000+ agents who sit across from students in tier-two cities across India, Nigeria, Vietnam, and the Philippines; the 1,500+ institutional partners who trust those agents; the employers at the other end who care whether the graduates can actually do something. The technology matters, but it amplifies something that already has to exist. Trust, built face to face, market by market.
“The question is no longer where did you study, but what can you do?” He said that in an interview in October 2025. It is not a rhetorical flourish. It is the practical challenge his platform is built to address.
THE LARGER ARCHITECTURE
MSM Unify is not the whole of what Laul is building. In 2019, he founded Laul Global Ventures, a holding group that now spans thirteen brands across four structural pillars: education technology, future ventures, real assets, and an active mergers and acquisitions mandate. The education portfolio includes not just MSM Unify but a set of Canadian institutions where Laul serves as CEO or Director, among them Innivec, Eton College Canada, and Florida Coastal University in the United States, expanding the footprint into a third major English-language destination market that most commentary on his work overlooks entirely.
Innivec matters particularly in the context of his broader thesis. It is, in practice, a live demonstration of the credential-to-employment argument: an institution built not around the prestige of the degree but around the outcome at the other end of it. Whether a graduate is workforce-ready, and whether an employer actually wants to hire them.He also sits on the board of UBC, the Women’s Enterprise Centre, and the BC Emerging Economy Task Force. Those roles aren’t mentioned often in profiles of him. They should be. They are the institutional credibility layer underneath the platform story.
His current India investment is US$20 million, supporting three offices across Noida, Gurgaon, and Ahmedabad, with a franchise network of 250 locations planned. He does not talk about India as a source market. He talks about it as a design laboratory, a place where the complexity of the problem, the
volume of students, the diversity of the agent network, the distance between aspiration and infrastructure, is so extreme that solutions built to work there are solutions built to scale anywhere.
“For countries like India, the opportunity is enormous. India has one of the world’s largest youth populations, and the global economy increasingly depends on skilled talent. If we can create more trusted pathways for education and employability, we are not just helping individuals; we are contributing to long-term economic and social progress.”
— Sanjay Laul
WHAT DOESN’T MAKE IT INTO THE PITCH DECK
Laul has a family. His wife, Tejal, is a co-operator in the business. His son, Mahir, is a next-generation founder in his own right, running LaulX in New York and building Velric in the HR-tech space. This is a family-owned business in the structural sense of the term, not a VC-backed platform working toward a liquidity event. That distinction shapes how decisions get made.
He talks about his mother occasionally. The garment shop she suggested. The pressure she absorbed from the neighbourhood. He doesn’t frame this as inspiration. He frames it as context. She was working with what she had, as he was. He got his first passport at 26 not knowing what a visa was. He has since visited dozens of countries, and he describes his preparation for each one with the same methodical attention he applies to business: study the culture, understand the government, learn the unspoken expectations before you arrive.
It’s the same instinct that built the GMO model. Local knowledge is not a nice-to-have. It’s the only thing
that actually works.
WHERE THIS IS GOING
MSM Unify’s Vision 2028 target is 5 million learners. The current figure is over a million. The gap is not closing through marketing. It’s closing through the same method that built the first million: one institutional relationship, one agent partnership, one student at a time, in markets where the trust has been earned rather than assumed.
The boy who ranked near the bottom of his class in Lucknow is now working on infrastructure that moves students between continents. He doesn’t talk about this as an arc of redemption. He talks about it as a problem he found that was worth solving.The queue in Delhi is still there, metaphorically. There are still millions of students waiting for guidance, trust, and a pathway they can actually follow. MSM Unify’s argument is that the platform is not what closes that gap. The relationships are.
“Digital platforms open doors. Relationships help students walk through them.”
— Sanjay Laul
Sanjay Laul is Founder and Director of MSM Unify and the founder of Laul Global Ventures. He is based in
Greater Vancouver, Canada.
Follow Sanjay Laul on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/sanjaylaul
Website: https://www.msmunify.com/