The founders of Pandai — Khairul, Akmal, and Suhaimi — have known each other since high school. They completed undergraduate education at American universities, at Purdue University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), respectively. After graduation, they worked for global companies such as Motorola, Intel and Khazanah Nasional.

In 2007, they met for lunch in KL, where the three of them toyed with the idea of getting into business together. Since then, the three founders have been together in their entrepreneurial journey, bringing them through many different companies across many industries.

Khairul, Akmal, and Suhaimi founded Aidan Group, a group of companies with businesses in technology and education.

Ardent Edu, an education consultancy company that focuses on educational policy and programs, is one of the companies. Over the years, through its programs, Ardent Edu has engaged 2800+ schools from all over Malaysia.

Ardent Edu also organizes 4 academic competitions and 5 national olympiad programs. More than 75,000 took part in its programs in 2019 alone.

Along with being serial entrepreneurs, the founders have always been passionate about education and have had many years of experience as advocates of education in Malaysia.

Khairul serves as the Malaysian Computational Thinking Association president, a member of the International Bebras Community (IBC), and is the international jury for the Linguistics Olympiad (APLO).

Akmal is the tech lead of Aidan Tech, a software house focusing on building applications for the public and private sectors. Over the years, he has led technical teams and completed more than 120 digital transformation projects.

Suhaimi has years of experience in the education industry, from policy development to curriculum design. He served as the head coach of the Malaysian team to the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO). He brought the largest mathematics competition in the world, the Kangaroo Math Competition, to Malaysia.

Suhaimi is a lifelong math enthusiast and designed the Pandai logo based on the Fano plane, which he once came across in a geometry textbook.