Three co-founders have joined forces — an education leader and two senior software engineers from Silicon Valley with more than a decade of experience at world-class companies including Amazon, Meta, Google, Databricks, and Robinhood Markets. The systems they built and ran served anywhere from millions to billions of users worldwide. Today, they have come home to pass that same craft on to Thai people.
Technology is moving extraordinarily fast, and innovation is reshaping every industry and every way of working. The rapid rise of AI is changing how we build things — and the junior engineers or business owners who refuse to adapt will be left behind quickly.
Krairat Mairin (March), one of the co-founders, watched this shift happen first-hand at a startup in Silicon Valley. Bringing AI into the workflow cut time to market by up to 5× and boosted productivity by as much as 20×, while team members who could not keep pace were let go.
Until now, most businesses have had to rent off-the-shelf software, pay every month, and bend their team’s workflow to fit the program. AI has flipped that. Today you can build an app that fits your business in just a few days — and you own and control the entire system yourself. That is the skill we teach.
To meet this moment, SV Academy was founded by three co-founders: Prom Parndejpong, a second-generation educator, alongside two Silicon Valley engineers, Krairat Mairin (March) and Charlie Pisuraj. Lertlah School is the first partner to embrace and pilot the program — the first of its kind in Thailand — beginning with students aged 10 to 15.
Meet the Three Co-Founders
Prom Parndejpong
“A great app isn’t just code. It’s how it looks, how it feels, and how people experience it.”
A second-generation designer and educator who grew up inside Lertlah School, the bilingual school his family founded. He holds a BA in Graphic Communication & Design from the University of Sunderland, UK, and currently serves as Assistant Director of Development and Innovation at Lertlah School. At SV Academy, Prom leads all of design and the learning experience, and serves as the cultural and strategic bridge between the Silicon Valley engineers and the parents and children in Thailand.
Krairat Mairin (March)
“Our mission is to close the gap between Silicon Valley and Thailand, until there’s no gap left.”
From a Chiang Mai kid to a frontline Senior Software Engineer in Silicon Valley, March earned his engineering degree from the Faculty of Engineering at Chulalongkorn University and a Master’s in Bioengineering Innovation & Design from Johns Hopkins University. Driven by a love of building product, he taught himself to code and went on to join the team behind a pioneering AI, Amazon.com’s Alexa — building more than ten years of experience at leading tech companies including Databricks, Uniswap, and Magic Eden. Today he is bringing that playbook and a world-class technology ecosystem home to lift the capability of a new generation of Thai talent, from the classroom all the way to industry.
Charlie Pisuraj
“Real success is measured by what you can deliver in an age when knowledge is cheap. Anyone can do it with the right tools in their hands.”
The technical backbone of SV Academy, Charlie holds a degree in Computer Engineering from UC Irvine, USA. He is an engineer with deep expertise in technical infrastructure, having run the back-end systems for giants serving billions of users, including Meta (Facebook), Wing (the drone company under Google X), and Robinhood Markets. Charlie brings the teaching of real, industry-proven tools and system design, so that Thai organizations can build software that is efficient, secure, and ready to scale.
One Ecosystem, Two Tracks
SV Academy is a builder of technology ecosystems, developing high-quality talent from young students all the way to executives and business owners. The academy feeds skilled people into modern organizations and equips entrepreneurs to build their own software and put it to real use in their own businesses. To deliver on that vision, the curriculum spans two tracks.
SV Academy Junior (ages 10–15)
The academy began with classes for children aged 10 to 15 — the country’s most important foundation. As one co-founder put it, “If we can teach a 10-year-old to build an app of their own, then we can certainly teach people of any age to do it too.” Cohort 1 began on June 13, and Cohort 2 begins on September 5 — giving kids the chance to build apps from their own imagination and turn them from everyday users into innovators.
SV Academy for Entrepreneurs & Business Owners
Proven out by the Junior class — and seeing how much it matters for industry — we’re bringing the Silicon Valley ecosystem home to Thailand with an intensive course for entrepreneurs and business owners. The first class begins on August 23, with no prior programming experience required. It helps businesses create new innovations without hiring software engineers or buying off-the-shelf software from abroad: we teach you to put AI to work and build real applications that raise efficiency, cut costs, and open new revenue streams in a big way. We also provide a blueprint for building innovation, along with a network of experts organizations can pull in the moment a project or business goal outgrows the internal team.