Startup Deep Dive : IndiQube — how a coworking IPO went from a 341 crore loss to profits narrowing 58% in a year

IndiQube lost ₹341.5 crore in FY24, then cut that loss by more than half the very next year while revenue crossed ₹1,000 crore for the first time — and still went public at a price that fell below its issue band on day one. The company that pitched itself as the “office in a box” for India’s mid-market companies had to survive a pandemic that gutted the entire coworking industry, a wave of write-downs on its own financial instruments, and a listing-day price that closed nearly 9% under its IPO price, before settling into life as a small-cap on the NSE and BSE.

Founded in Bengaluru in 2015 by Rishi Das and Meghna Agarwal, IndiQube Spaces Limited is now one of three flexible-workspace operators — alongside WeWork India and Awfis — to have taken the Indian coworking model to public markets in 2025. Its journey from a single 150,000 sq ft building in Bellandur to 115 centres across 15 cities is a study in how capital-intensive “asset-light” businesses actually work: long lease commitments, thin margins, and a balance sheet that looks worse on paper than the underlying business often is.

Quick facts

What they do

IndiQube runs managed office space for companies that do not want to sign, fit out and administer a 10-year commercial lease themselves. It leases large floor plates from landlords, builds them out into ready-to-use offices, and then re-lets desks, cabins and entire floors to clients on flexible terms — anything from a single freelancer’s seat to a 500-seat floor for an enterprise. It calls this the “office in a box” model: the client gets furniture, internet, security, housekeeping, a cafeteria and reception on day one, without touching a single vendor contract. As of 31 March 2025 it managed 115 centres across 15 Indian cities, spanning 8.40 million sq ft and 186,719 seats. The client base skews toward technology: IT and IT-enabled companies make up roughly half its occupiers, alongside global capability centres, BFSI firms and a long tail of small and mid-sized businesses.

The origin

The idea did not start as a coworking pitch. Meghna Agarwal, an MBA from IMT Ghaziabad who had earlier worked on the Singapore Stock Exchange before turning entrepreneur, had already co-founded the recruitment platform HirePro with her husband Rishi Das — who also founded the staffing firm CareerNet — and later ran a minerals-manufacturing venture. In 2014, some of their own companies were shifting offices in Bengaluru, and Meghna’s team found itself with more leased space than it needed. They began sub-leasing the surplus, and noticed something specific: the startups and offshore development centres approaching them did not just want empty desks. They wanted cafeterias, shuttle transport, meeting rooms and someone else to deal with the landlord. That gap — real estate wrapped in hospitality and facilities management — became the founding insight. In 2015, Meghna and Rishi leased their first dedicated building, a roughly 150,000 sq ft property in Bellandur called Alpha, with no prior experience running a coworking business. It was fully occupied within six months.

The struggle years

The model that worked in a boom year turned fragile the moment demand wobbled. In 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic emptied Indian offices overnight, and IndiQube’s occupancy fell from around 90% in pre-pandemic conditions to about 80%, even as it still owed landlords rent on every square foot it had committed to under long leases. Unlike its own clients, who could walk away from monthly licences with comparatively short notice, IndiQube could not walk away from ten-year leases with a three-year lock-in — the mismatch between what it owed landlords and what it could collect from tenants was the single biggest threat to the business surviving the pandemic.

The second setback was slower and less visible: a widening loss that had nothing to do with the operating business. In FY24, IndiQube’s net loss jumped 72% year-on-year to ₹341.51 crore, even as revenue from operations grew strongly. The cause was not rent or salaries — it was an accounting one. A loss on the fair valuation of financial liabilities, largely tied to compulsorily convertible instruments issued to investors, more than doubled to ₹268.95 crore in FY24 from ₹112.24 crore in FY23. Occupancy also slipped in that period, from 83.68% as of 31 March 2023 to 80.21% as of 31 March 2024, right as the company was preparing its IPO paperwork — an uncomfortable set of numbers to be carrying into a public listing.

The turning point

The turnaround came in the twelve months immediately before the IPO. Going into FY25, IndiQube was sitting on a ₹341 crore annual loss and occupancy below 81% — the kind of trajectory that spooks bankers ahead of a listing. What followed instead was a sharp reversal: revenue from operations rose 28% to ₹1,059 crore in FY25, from ₹830 crore the year before, while the net loss narrowed by roughly 58–60% to about ₹139–141 crore. Occupancy climbed back to 85.12%. That combination — growing revenue, shrinking losses, recovering occupancy — is what let Rishi Das and the board take the company to SEBI with a draft prospectus in December 2024 and, seven months later, to the stock exchanges. Without that one year of repair, the IPO conversation likely does not happen on the same timeline.

The money behind it

IndiQube’s capital history is unusually debt-heavy for a company often described as a “startup.” According to co-founder Rishi Das, by the time of its IPO filing the company had raised roughly ₹332 crore in debt against ₹325 crore in equity — a reminder that fitting out dozens of office buildings costs real money upfront, well before any client pays rent.

• WestBridge Capital — invested ₹190 crore in 2018, the round that funded IndiQube’s expansion beyond its early Bengaluru buildings into a multi-city portfolio; by the DRHP, WestBridge’s Aravali Investment Holding vehicle held 22.07% and WestBridge AIF I a further 5.79% of the company.
• Ashish Gupta (angel investor) and the promoters — joined WestBridge in an April 2022 round that raised $30 million (about ₹225–240 crore at then-prevailing rates), used to fund further city expansion after the pandemic disruption.
• Founders and founder-linked entities — Anshuman Das (25.15%), Rishi Das and Meghna Agarwal (18.84% each on a fully diluted basis), plus Careernet Technologies (5.15%) and Hirepro Consulting (2.15%), together anchoring the promoter and promoter-group holding.

The IPO itself was the biggest capital event: IndiQube’s board initially filed a DRHP in December 2024 seeking ₹850 crore (a ₹750 crore fresh issue plus a ₹100 crore offer for sale by promoters Rishi Das and Meghna Agarwal). By the time the red herring prospectus was finalised in July 2025, the fresh issue had been trimmed to ₹650 crore alongside a ₹50 crore offer for sale, taking the total issue size to ₹700 crore, priced in a band of ₹225–237 per share. Of the fresh-issue proceeds, the company earmarked ₹462.7 crore for capital expenditure on new centres and ₹93.04 crore to repay borrowings, with the rest for general corporate purposes.

How it makes money

The mechanics are simple to describe and hard to execute well: IndiQube signs long leases with building owners at one rent, spends capital fitting the space out, and then re-lets desks and cabins to occupiers at a higher effective rate that covers rent, fit-out amortisation, facility staff, utilities and a margin. The part people consistently get wrong is treating this as a real estate business when it is closer to a hospitality-and-services business built on top of real estate — the margin sits in operational efficiency (utilisation, staffing ratios, procurement of services like housekeeping and F&B) rather than in the property itself, which IndiQube never owns.

• Workspace leasing / rental income — the core line, contributing ₹870 crore of FY25’s ₹1,059 crore revenue from operations (about 82%), and ₹741.58 crore of FY24’s ₹867.66 crore reported at DRHP stage; billed as monthly licence fees per seat or per floor.
• Value-added services (VAS) — food and beverage, transport, meeting-room and event-space bookings, and other on-site services; ₹92.19 crore in FY24, up 35% year-on-year, a smaller but higher-margin layer on top of the base lease.
• Cost structure — the largest recurring costs are lease rentals payable to landlords, employee benefit expenses (₹76 crore in FY25) for facility and operations staff, and depreciation on fit-outs; margin depends heavily on keeping occupancy above the level needed to cover the fixed lease obligation on each centre.

The numbers

Revenue and losses below are as reported in IndiQube’s DRHP (filed December 2024) and in RHP-stage disclosures around its July 2025 listing. Note a discrepancy across public reporting: Inc42, citing the DRHP, put FY24 revenue from operations at ₹867.66 crore, while Entrackr and Business Standard, citing later RHP-stage restated financials, put the same FY24 figure at ₹830 crore. Both are shown so readers can see the range; the FY25 figures below are consistent across sources.

• FY23 → FY24 revenue growth: 44% (₹601.28 crore to ₹867.66 crore, DRHP basis, Inc42).
• FY24 → FY25 revenue growth: 27–28% (₹830 crore to ₹1,059 crore revenue from operations; ₹1,103 crore including other income, Entrackr and Business Standard).
• FY23 → FY24 loss growth: 72% (₹198.11 crore to ₹341.51 crore), driven mainly by a non-cash fair-valuation loss on financial liabilities, not by operations.
• FY24 → FY25 loss reduction: roughly 58–60% (₹341 crore to ₹139–141 crore).

Where the money comes from

The surprise in IndiQube’s numbers is not its city count — it is how concentrated the revenue actually is despite a 15-city footprint. Bengaluru, Pune and Chennai together accounted for more than 88% of revenue from operations in recent fiscal years, with Bengaluru alone hosting 60 of the company’s centres. The remaining twelve cities, despite roughly a quarter of the centre count, contribute a small minority of revenue.

• Bengaluru, Pune and Chennai combined: over 88% of revenue from operations in recent fiscal years; for the quarter ended 30 June 2024 specifically, 91.59% of revenue came from these three cities.
• Bengaluru alone: 60 of IndiQube’s 115 centres as of FY25, making it by far the single largest market and single largest concentration risk.
• Client mix by sector: IT and IT-enabled services companies make up close to half of IndiQube’s occupiers, with named clients including Zerodha and Myntra, alongside global capability centres and BFSI tenants.
• Seat mix: clients range from single-seat freelancers to enterprise floors of 500-plus seats, a wider span than some peers that focus only on large enterprise accounts.

The risks

• Geographic concentration. With more than 88% of revenue tied to just three cities — Bengaluru, Pune and Chennai — a local real estate downturn, an oversupply of competing flex-space, or a slowdown in any one city’s IT hiring can move the company’s overall numbers disproportionately. IndiQube’s DRHP itself flags dependence on Bengaluru, where it runs 60 of its 115 centres.
• Fixed lease obligations against flexible client contracts. IndiQube commits to landlords on 10-year leases with three-year lock-ins, while many of its own clients can exit on much shorter notice. This mismatch is exactly what hurt the business when occupancy fell during the pandemic, and it remains a structural feature of the model, compounded by ₹227.45 crore of borrowings on the books as of FY24.
• Earnings volatility from financial-instrument accounting and competition. Non-cash fair-valuation movements on financial liabilities (₹268.95 crore of the FY24 loss) can swing reported profitability sharply, making year-on-year comparisons noisy for investors. On top of that, IndiQube competes directly with WeWork India, Awfis, Smartworks, Table Space and 315Work Avenue for the same enterprise and mid-market tenants, keeping pricing power limited.

The takeaway

IndiQube’s story is a reminder that “asset-light” is a relative term, not an absolute one. The company never owns a building, yet it carries ten-year lease commitments that behave a lot like debt when demand turns down — which is exactly what happened in 2020, and again, in a different form, when a single line of financial-instrument accounting nearly tripled its reported loss in FY24. The lesson that generalises beyond coworking is this: a business can be growing its real, operating revenue at 30-40% a year and still look like it is failing on the bottom line, because the accounting treatment of how it raised capital can swamp the accounting treatment of how it runs its stores, centres, or floors. Investors and operators who only read the net-loss line would have missed both the 2020 crisis and the 2025 recovery for the wrong reasons.

Frequently asked questions

What does IndiQube do?

It leases large office floor plates from landlords, fits them out, and re-lets desks, cabins and floors to companies on flexible terms, bundling in services like food and beverage, transport and meeting rooms — an approach it calls “office in a box.”

Who founded IndiQube and when?

Rishi Das and Meghna Agarwal founded IndiQube in Bengaluru in 2015, after noticing demand for fully serviced flexible offices while sub-leasing surplus space from their own earlier businesses.

Is IndiQube profitable?

No. It reported a net loss of ₹139–141 crore in FY25, though that was a 58–60% improvement on the ₹341 crore net loss it posted in FY24, alongside revenue from operations crossing ₹1,000 crore for the first time.

When and where did IndiQube list, and how has the stock performed?

IndiQube listed on the NSE and BSE on 30 July 2025 at a roughly 9% discount to its ₹237 issue price. As of August 2026, its market capitalisation was around ₹4,000–4,300 crore, and its share price traded around ₹205–206 in September 2026, below its issue price.

Who are IndiQube’s major shareholders?

Promoters Rishi Das, Meghna Agarwal and Anshuman Das together hold the largest block on a fully diluted basis, with WestBridge Capital (through Aravali Investment Holding and WestBridge AIF I) as the largest institutional investor at roughly 27-28% combined pre-IPO stake, diluted after listing.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• YourStory, “Workplace solutions provider IndiQube files DRHP, eyes ₹850 crore IPO” — December 2024
• Inc42, “IndiQube Files DRHP For INR 850 Cr IPO” — December 2024
• Inc42, “IndiQube DRHP: A Look At The Shareholding Pattern & Key Leaders” — December 2024/January 2025
• Inc42, “IPO-Bound IndiQube’s Loss Widens 72% To INR 341.5 Cr In FY24” — 2025
• Inc42, “Flexible Work, Fixed Returns? Breaking Down WeWork India & IndiQube’s Public Listings” — 2025
• Entrackr, “IndiQube Raises $30 Mn from promoters and WestBridge Capital” — April 2022
• YourStory, “[Funding alert] IndiQube raises $30M from promoters, WestBridge Capital” — April 2022
• Entrackr, “IndiQube crosses Rs 1,000 Cr revenue mark in FY25; cuts losses by 58%” — July 2025
• Business Standard, “IPO-bound Indiqube Spaces’ net loss narrows to ₹140 crore in FY25” — July 2025
• Business Standard, “Indiqube Spaces IPO opens on July 23; check key strengths, risks from RHP” — July 2025
• Business Standard, “Indiqube Spaces IPO fully subscribed on Day 2, retail investors lead demand” — July 2025
• Business Standard, “Indiqube Spaces shares make muted D-Street debut, list at 9% discount” — July 2025
• Outlook Business, “IPO-Bound Indiqube Spaces FY25 Net Loss at Rs 140 Cr, Revenue Rises 27% to Rs 1,103 Cr” — July 2025
• Trendlyne, “Indiqube Spaces (INDIQUBE) Live Share Price” — accessed September 2026
• Business Standard, “Indiqube Spaces Ltd share price” market data page — accessed August/September 2026
• IndiQube.com, “Meghna Agarwal: The Space Maker Behind IndiQube” — company profile
• WestBridge Capital, founder profile pages for Rishi Das and Meghna Agarwal

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