He never set out to build this.

The beginning

Vidyasagar is a speech-language pathologist, and he is the founder and clinical director of Cornerstone. In 2014 he opened its first centre in Kalyan Nagar, when finding therapy for a child in Bangalore was close to impossible. In his words, it was a desert.

He did not set out to run a centre. He says the work chose him — children kept arriving, and there was nowhere else to send them.

Read plainly: Cornerstone wasn’t built as a business. It was built because the families came, and he was the one who could help. The same instinct runs through the place today — every child treated the way he would want his own treated.

Grown one family at a time

For years, Cornerstone grew the slow way. A mother told her sister. A father told his colleague. A paediatrician told the next worried parent. Twelve years on, Cornerstone is about twenty people across two centres — Kalyan Nagar and Dr. Shivarama Karanth Nagar — and about seven in ten families still arrive because another family said our name.

Some families come further than the next street. We have served families who travelled from Mysore, from the Karnataka districts, and from as far as Tirupati, Andhra Pradesh, Hyderabad, Visakhapatnam and Mumbai. That is not something we advertise; it’s something that happens when a place earns its name one child at a time.

Standards he won’t bend

Cornerstone does not offer everything that could be sold. When a child needs something Cornerstone doesn’t do, we say so plainly, and we help the family find the right place. He applies one test to every decision, and it has nothing to do with the balance sheet.

It’s the same test that keeps the entry level low — sessions from ₹900, consultations at ₹1,000 — and printed on the website for anyone to read: care a parent can afford should not be care a parent has to haggle for.

What he gives back

He grew up in this community and he says the centre is his way of returning something to it.

That sentence, in his own slightly unpolished words, is the founder’s standard too — for your child’s plan, for your questions, for the way the phone is answered. He has built a team that carries the same standard, because he holds the whole place to it.

And the best, for him, is never off the shelf: it needs to be custom made, child to child.

The approach behind the name

Since 2014, the practice has also held a neurodiversity-informed approach — working with each child’s profile rather than trying to erase the difference. That stance was there long before it had a name.

The full list of the specialised approaches our therapists draw on, with what each one supports, sits on the services hub — and below.