After a variety of business pursuits, Sarbjyot Bains believes he may have finally found the entrepreneurial venture that can change the world — an educational platform for the world’s most inexpensive tablets.

Born and raised in Gujarat in Western India, Bains is now a 22-year-old chemical engineering student at the University of New Brunswick. Despite his young age, he has initiated several startups, featuring them in various competitions around the Maritimes.

But he believes he has now found the venture he can move forward with.

Bains is the CEO of NovelBoard, a Fredericton-based information technology startup that has been building up a relationship with Datawind, a British-based company that is producing $25 tablets to help educate the poor in the developing world. NovelBoard has developed an education delivery platform for the tablet so they can have the software needed to deliver curriculum to students in India and other countries.

Bains’ grand vision is that one day the NovelBoard platform will be in more than 200 million of the devices, helping to educate some of the world’s poorest people.

For now, he is focusing on bringing the product to market, which he said could happen as early as April of this year. Bains won the Nicol Entrepreneurial Award for innovation at UNB, and he has now entered the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation’s Breakthru Competition.

He’s looking for equity funding of $50,000, which is all he needs to complete the first phase of product development.

Bains has dreamed of being an entrepreneur since he was a boy in India, and has worked on several ideas, from biofuels to medical devices. He was at Startup Weekend Halifax in November with a non-intrusive device that would monitor such vital signs as blood sugar levels in elderly people, and notify health authorities if the level drops dangerously low.

 “As you can see, all my … startups have always focused on health and education,” he said in a telephone interview. “It’s in health and education that you can truly change the world.”

His real eureka moment came when he met the CEO of Datawind in Toronto and began to use the tablets. He realized there was no platform for delivering courses, and immediately began to work on one.

He gathered a team of five developers (who so far have worked for free), and over a 10-day sprint they came up with a working model.

Bains has had five video conferences with Datawind’s vice-president of platform development in India. Though they have not yet signed a memorandum of understanding, Bains believes they will be able to do so.

If he does sign a deal with Datawind, NovelBoard won’t have to worry about marketing costs because the software would be preloaded in the tablets, which would be sold by the British company. So the only costs would be paying the development team.

Bains believes the company could begin to receive revenue as soon as the platform is launched. The revenue would, of course, come from the sales.

But once there are one million or so users, NovelBoard could also mine the data produced by the tablets and sell the analysis of the data to Datawind for future projects. For example, the data would show what courses are most popular, how one year of students is performing compared to another, etc.

Such information could help to develop future projects.