How SV Academy Began: Bangkok School Meets Silicon Valley
A Bangkok school founded in 1994, two Silicon Valley engineers and one dinner. The story of how SV Academy started, and the three people who built it.
SV Academy is an AI school in Bangkok where children and business owners learn to build real, working software with AI, taught in the room by engineers who have spent their careers at Silicon Valley companies. It was founded by three people from two very different worlds: an educator from a family of Thai school founders, and two senior software engineers who built systems at some of the largest technology companies in the United States.
This is how it started.
A school built like a second home
The first half of the story begins in 1994, when the Parndejpong family founded Lertlah School on a small three-rai plot in Bangkok. Their founding belief was that a school should feel like a second home: character first, with academics right beside it. Thirty years on, Lertlah has three campuses and a bilingual programme.
When COVID moved classes onto screens, Prom Parndejpong, a second-generation educator in the family, sat down with teachers who had twenty years in the classroom and brought them up to speed one tool at a time: Canva, then video, then ChatGPT. The teachers came out of the shift more capable than they went in. That raised a question Prom kept coming back to. If the right tool could make a veteran teacher far more capable in a few weeks, what could it do in the hands of a twelve-year-old?
Prom started trying to build an app that would teach children AI, and kept hitting the same wall. Anything shipped was out of date within months, because the tools moved faster than the app could.
Silicon Valley watches AI change the work
The second half began on the other side of the world. March Mairin, a senior software engineer in Silicon Valley who grew up in Chiang Mai, watched AI change how software gets built. March's team shipped a complex product from scratch in two months, and designers and product managers started contributing code.
The same tools also make mistakes while sounding completely certain. Without experienced engineers steering them, March concluded, AI cannot build production software that scales safely to millions of users.
March took the idea to Charlie Pisuraj, a close friend for ten years and the pragmatic sceptic of the pair, who saw the risk of "AI slop". Charlie's view was that AI is an extraordinary tool, but it needs deep system-design judgement to stay on the rails. Together they founded SV & Co., a network of Silicon Valley engineers with one mission: close the gap between Silicon Valley and Thailand.
One dinner, and a different product
March and Prom were not strangers, but not old friends either. For years they had moved in the same circles and known each other only in passing. When March finally called, it was to describe, from the opposite side of the planet, the exact problem Prom had been stuck on.
Over dinner, it clicked. Prom had been trying to build a product. What they needed to build was people: children who could build anything they could imagine, the way real engineers do, with whatever tools existed that year. SV & Co. brought the engineering and the way Silicon Valley teams ship. Lertlah brought the classroom, the students and thirty years of knowing how to teach a child.
The founders sum it up on SV Academy's own story page:
Put those two halves on one table and you don't get an app. You get an academy.
From a first cohort to two tracks
SV Academy's first class, Junior Cohort 1, ran on five Saturdays from 13 June to 11 July 2026. Ten students aged 10 to 15, with no coding experience required, each designed, built and shipped their own AI-powered web app. They then presented it live on stage at Demo Day in Bangkok, in front of family, mentors and a spokesperson from Thailand's Ministry of Education. All ten apps are still online, in the school's portfolio and on Loop, its free learning site.
The course follows the six stages a Silicon Valley product team uses to ship: idea, product requirements, design, code, ship, and a live demo.
Junior Cohort 2 followed in October 2026, with 15 seats and five weekday sessions (5, 7, 9, 14 and 16 October) at Lertlah School Kanchanapisek Road.
A second track, for entrepreneurs and business owners, ran its first cohort from 12 September to 11 October 2026. It is a three-day intensive, taught in Thai by the founders, in which each person builds software for their own business with AI. Flooding in Bangkok moved its second day and its Demo Day from late September to 10 and 11 October. The next entrepreneur cohort runs in spring 2027. That track puts its apps live on SV Cloud, a hosting platform built by the same team.
SV Academy has been covered by Thairath, Thai Post and Techsauce. It is the education brand of Silicon Valley Innovation, a Bangkok software and AI company, where the engineers who teach also build software and AI products for businesses.
The founders
Prom Parndejpong, co-founder, creative and operations
Prom is a designer and a second-generation educator, with a BA in Graphic Communication and Design from the University of Sunderland in the UK. Prom is Assistant Director of Development and Innovation at Lertlah School. At SV Academy, Prom leads creative direction, application design and in-class design coaching, and is the bridge between the engineers and Thai families.
"A great app isn't just code. It's how it looks, how it feels, how people experience it."
March Mairin, co-founder, curriculum and technical lead
March grew up in Chiang Mai, studied engineering at Chulalongkorn University and earned a master's degree at Johns Hopkins University. Over a decade as a software engineer, March built and scaled production systems at Amazon, Databricks, Uniswap Labs and Magic Eden. March now works full time on SV Academy, leads its curriculum and is on site for every session.
"Our mission is to close the gap between Silicon Valley and Thailand, until there's no gap."
Charlie Pisuraj, co-founder, engineering
Charlie studied Computer Engineering at the University of California, Irvine, then spent a career on backend systems and infrastructure at very large scale: infrastructure at Meta, autonomous delivery at Wing, which came out of Google X, and Robinhood. At SV Academy, Charlie leads technical architecture and Demo Day coaching, is in the room for every session on both tracks, and builds SV Cloud.
"Real success is what you can deliver in an age when knowledge is cheap. Anyone can do it with the right tools."
FAQ
Who founded SV Academy?
SV Academy was co-founded by Prom Parndejpong, March Mairin and Charlie Pisuraj: an educator from the family that founded Lertlah School, and two Silicon Valley software engineers.
When did SV Academy start?
Its first class, Junior Cohort 1, ran from 13 June to 11 July 2026 in Bangkok, with ten students aged 10 to 15.
Where is SV Academy?
In Bangkok, Thailand. Junior Cohort 2 was held at Lertlah School Kanchanapisek Road.
Who owns SV Academy?
SV Academy is the education brand of Silicon Valley Innovation Co., Ltd. (บริษัท ซิลิคอน วัลเลย์ อินโนเวชั่น จำกัด), company registration 0105569146015, which also builds software and AI products for businesses.
Do students need to know how to code?
No. SV Academy Junior is for ages 10 to 15 and needs no coding experience. The entrepreneur course is built for business owners, not programmers.
How do I join SV Academy?
Families join the Junior waitlist at sv-academy.org/register. The next entrepreneur cohort runs in spring 2027 and takes applications on the same page, or on LINE at @svacademy.
