Our Story

The people behind Forefront.

Forefront was founded by Shameer Thobhani and Hitesh Chowdhry.

The Founders

Shameer Thobhani

Shameer began his career in investment banking at UBS, then traded emerging market credit derivatives at ABN AMRO and RBS. He co-founded and scaled the world’s largest provider of career immersion programs for teenagers, acquired by a KKR-backed education multinational in 2022. He continued to lead the business before handing over to new management in 2025. He holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from UCL and a master’s in financial economics from the University of Oxford. At Forefront, he leads brand, marketing and admissions.

Hitesh Chowdhry

Hitesh is a qualified lawyer who co-founded and scaled the world’s largest provider of career immersion programs for teenagers — more than 90,000 students educated — later acquired by a KKR-backed education multinational. Earlier he practiced as a litigator at several high-profile law firms and led a thirty-strong sales and marketing team across Europe and Asia for a Carlyle-backed legal technology business. Master’s in law and an MBA; lifetime member of the honor society Beta Gamma Sigma for finishing top of his MBA class. He leads program, delivery and operations, and is in New York throughout every cohort.

Between us we have spent more than a decade inside these professions with young people, and we understand, as clearly as anyone, what the next generation now has to become.

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The fourteen years before.

We built one of the world’s largest career-education institutions, and sold it in 2022.

100,000: young people educated
24: careers taught
100+: countries
2,000+: partner schools

Then the world changed.

AI began absorbing the technical work that once took years to master — not all of it, but enough to change what a career rewards. Judgment, persuasion and the nerve to decide under pressure began to count for more.

Everything we had learned in fourteen years still held — real professionals, real-world challenges, real industry venues. What had changed was what a young person needed to take from them.

The problem we couldn’t stop seeing.

We watched it happen over and over. A young person decides what to aim for on almost no real sight of the work — a parent’s job, a television program, a subject they happen to be good at — and then commits years, and hundreds of thousands of dollars, to finding out whether they were right.

Nobody would make any other decision this way.

And at the end of it, the evidence they carry is the same as everyone else’s — the same grades, the same essay, the same list of activities.

So we built Forefront differently.

Forefront puts a young person inside the work before they commit to it.

And while they are there, the professionals beside them watch how they think, how they decide, and how they respond under pressure. What they see becomes something the student can carry forward — evidence of their own, from people who would know.

Why we came back.

We had built the thing and sold it. We did not need to do it again.

But we kept meeting sixteen-year-olds choosing a career on almost no information, and watching the professions those careers sit in change faster than anyone was telling them. We knew exactly how to fix that. Nobody else was going to.

So we came back.