In 2015, Bhav Singh bought into a world where the audience had already arrived. Sandbox, the business he had just co-founded with Abhi Arya, acquired Pearson’s Family Education Network. There were games, parenting resources, teaching materials and children with places to go online. The entrepreneurial problem was what to do with something people already used.
It was a fitting beginning for an executive whose previous jobs had involved taking established names into unfamiliar territory. Singh had worked across sports and television, helped expand Viacom’s entertainment business and led Pearson English. He knew the peculiar challenge of a recognizable brand: everybody has heard of it, and you still have to persuade them to care.
At Sandbox, he began assembling a business around learning outside the formal lesson. A child might arrive for an adventure, a video or a game. A parent might come looking for an activity. The invitation had to be attractive enough to accept without a teacher standing nearby. Homework has authority on its side. A game has to earn the next click.
Before the games, the channels
The earlier chapter comes with a rather different photograph. At the 2009 MTV Africa Music Awards, Singh sits beside Wyclef Jean, wearing a pale jacket and an event pass. This was his working world before book subscriptions and children’s learning apps: music television, entertainment brands and the business of reaching audiences across borders.
By 2008, his emerging markets remit at MTV Networks International covered Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Russia. His work included channel launches and digital services. MTV Arabia had debuted in November 2007; Comedy Central had launched in Poland. The titles changed as he moved up, eventually becoming managing director and executive vice president.
In a January 2008 interview, Singh described a business preparing to serve people across television, mobile and broadband. The striking detail was his willingness to change the order. An online service could precede a localized broadcast channel. If the audience was ready for one route, the company did not need to wait for the traditional sequence to catch up.
That was a practical view of media expansion. Some markets suited direct operations; others called for a licensing partner with local knowledge. A familiar logo could open the conversation. Regulation, infrastructure and the way people actually watched would determine how the business worked. International ambition still had to pass through a particular front door.
An education in joining things up
Singh’s career also includes Discovery Communications, IMG and Manchester United. Those employers put him in businesses where content, rights, audiences and commercial relationships are closely entangled. An MBA at Manchester Business School added a formal business qualification to a career already spent around the mechanics of distribution.
He moved to Pearson in 2012, becoming president and chief executive of its English and Informal Learning business. Here the audience wanted a capability as well as an experience. English learning stretched across institutions, retail, corporate customers and direct consumer products. Bringing those operations together meant working across different kinds of customers, rather than assuming one product would suit everyone.
His Pearson work included acquisitions such as GlobalEnglish, Grupo Multi and IOKI, brought into the Pearson English business. The recurring task was integration: find useful businesses, understand what each contributes and make the combination function. A collection can be impressive on a slide while remaining awkward in daily use. Running it is where the interesting questions begin.
He traces an early spark for Sandbox to a Pearson discussion about children’s video. Around him were individual businesses in games, learning and entertainment that might benefit from being connected. In 2015, he and Arya set out on their own. Buying the Family Education Network gave the idea a concrete beginning.
That first transaction mattered because the network served several participants in family learning: children, parents and teachers. Its activities included stories, games and homework help. Singh’s stated interest was in making those experiences more engaging and extending their usefulness. The purchase began with an existing relationship between products and their users.
The people came with the products
Sandbox’s later deals brought other entrepreneurs into the picture. In November 2019, it led a funding round that gave it a majority stake in Hopster, the preschool entertainment service founded by Nick Walters. Singh was named chairman. The two already knew each other’s work: Walters had previously run Viacom’s Russian business.
Hopster’s plans were specific. Investment would support product development, original content and distribution relationships with telecoms and pay television companies. It was another instance of the old media problem appearing in a new setting. Good material needed an effective route to the household, and a product that made sense when it arrived there.
The 2021 acquisition of Fingerprint made the operating logic more visible. Fingerprint chief executive Nancy MacIntyre was appointed to lead the newly formed Sandbox Kids division, bringing Kidomi together with Hopster and Curious World. The transaction joined a catalogue of content to experience in building and running subscription services.
At the announcement, the combined products covered more than 8,000 videos, games, interactive books, songs and audio experiences, available in over 100 countries and 23 languages. Partnerships extended across content creators, device makers, mobile carriers and television platforms. Those details explain the attraction of joining forces: a learning product needs considerably more than a clever activity.
“They are the veterans and I am the rookie.”
Bhav Singh, on the founders who joined Sandbox
Singh’s language about those founders is unusually deferential for the person at the top of the group. He gives them credit for building the original businesses, while describing his own contribution as helping them expand. It is a useful distinction inside a company assembled through acquisitions. Experience travels with people; buying a product does not automatically transfer their judgment.
A screen, a doorstep, a different language
In February 2022, Sandbox announced the acquisition of PlayKids. The Brazilian business included its children’s video app and Leiturinha, a book subscription service. One part of the business streamed into a home. Another could be opened at the kitchen table. The cardboard box had a perfectly respectable place beside the app.
The announcement described more than four million monthly users across the businesses and over 200,000 subscribers to the book club. Movile, PlayKids’ majority owner, would become a minority shareholder in Sandbox. Guilherme Martins, the PlayKids chief executive and Leiturinha founder, was named to lead Sandbox’s expansion into Latin America.
Singh saw the possibilities moving in both directions. Sandbox’s existing products could reach Portuguese-speaking families, while PlayKids could develop further through the group’s international network. His questions included how to take teaching and parenting properties into Brazil and how to deepen PlayKids’ presence in the United States. Translation was part of a larger operating job.
He also resisted describing the strategy as an exercise in accumulating acquisitions. His stated focus was the range of things a family might want that Sandbox did not yet offer. That is a more demanding test than simply finding another asset to buy. It asks what the addition does for the person on the other side of the transaction.
PlayKids and Leiturinha
subscribers
Two formats. A shared place in family life.
The next household
There are other clues to Singh’s interests away from an acquisition announcement. On a 2020 podcast, his reading recommendations included John Gimlette’s Elephant Complex, about Sri Lanka, and Wild Coast, about South America, alongside Ben Horowitz’s The Hard Thing About Hard Things. The list makes room for travel writing as well as the mechanics of running a company.
He follows cricket and is described in his public biography as a Pink Floyd fan. His professional relationships also remain part of his own account of learning: Bob Bakish at Viacom, Andrew Wildblood at IMG and Marjorie Scardino at Pearson each influenced his approach to decisions and people. His career contains teachers as well as transactions.
His board work extends beyond Sandbox. He joined GB Group as an independent non-executive director in November 2021 and became part of BBC Commercial’s board in 2022. Those appointments place his experience of digital businesses and international expansion alongside the work of running his own company.
The distribution story continued in May 2026, when PlayKids Learning launched on Prime Video in Canada with French and English programming. The service combined familiar children’s series with originals. Localization here was visible in the product itself: two languages, a known platform and a subscription offered where families could already watch.
An October 2026 announcement added access through Disney+ Perks in Brazil and Premium Subscriptions on The Roku Channel in Mexico. The Brazilian offering included Portuguese material; the Mexican service included localized Spanish content. These are particular arrangements for particular audiences, each carrying the familiar ambition of taking a brand into another household.
Seen together, Singh’s chapters have a consistent preoccupation. At MTV, he considered which route would bring entertainment to an audience. At Pearson, he helped bring different learning operations together. At Sandbox, games, video and books became part of a company built around the things people willingly return to.
The second act leaves plenty to do. A brand can be familiar and still need a new partner, another language or a better way to reach a family. Singh has made that unfinished work his business. Somewhere at the end of it, a child chooses a game or opens a book. The strategy has reached its intended address.