Startup Deep Dive : Livspace — the unicorn round that came before the losses got worse

Livspace turned unicorn the same year its own numbers were at their worst. In February 2022, KKR led a $180 million round that valued the Bengaluru-founded home-interiors platform at $1.2 billion, even as the company was spending Rs 2.13 to earn every rupee of revenue that year and its losses had just jumped 55% to Rs 645.2 crore.

Twelve years after two former Google and Myntra employees set out to fix India’s chaotic home-renovation industry, Livspace turned over Rs 1,460 crore (about $152 million) in FY25, cut its losses for a second straight year, and lined up papers to move its headquarters from Singapore back to India ahead of a planned public listing. Then, in February 2026, it cut roughly 1,000 jobs and lost a co-founder in the same announcement — a reminder that scaling a business that still has to show up at someone’s front door with a truckload of furniture is a different problem from scaling an app.

Quick facts

What they do

Livspace sells end-to-end home interiors: a homeowner comes in wanting a new kitchen, wardrobes or a full apartment fit-out, and Livspace runs the whole job — design consultation, 3D visualisation, manufacturing of modular furniture in its own factories, on-site installation, and coordination of allied trades such as electrical, plumbing, painting and civil work through a marketplace of vetted local partners. The company sells through roughly two dozen physical “experience centres” in Indian metros feeding an app-and-website funnel, plus a smaller Singapore business and an entry into Saudi Arabia. It is not a lead-generation marketplace that hands a homeowner off to a contractor and steps away; Livspace stays on the hook for the manufacturing and the installation, which is also why its cost structure looks more like a factory-and-logistics business than a pure software one.

The origin

Anuj Srivastava and Ramakant Sharma, both IIT Kanpur alumni, met the problem the way most Livspace customers do: by trying to renovate their own homes. Srivastava had spent seven years at Google, latterly as global head of product marketing for its e-commerce team, before leaving in 2014; Sharma had helped build and sell a large e-commerce fashion platform in Asia through his time at Myntra. Neither had run a renovation business before. What they had was a shared, personal frustration: identifying the right designer or contractor, coordinating a dozen different tradespeople, and getting a fair, predictable price were all opaque and stressful, even for two people who understood how to build a marketplace. Their founding insight was that Indian consumers had grown comfortable buying almost everything else online, but home renovation — one of the biggest-ticket purchases a household makes — remained fragmented, undocumented and prone to delay and cost overrun. They founded Livspace in Bengaluru in July 2014 to build what they called an “ecommerce-like, trusted and predictable experience” for it, initially as a curated marketplace connecting homeowners with independent interior designers, and raised a $4.6 million Series A that December from Helion Venture Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners and Jungle Ventures to build the first version of that marketplace.

The struggle years

The marketplace-only model did not hold up for long. Aggregating independent designers and third-party contractors meant Livspace controlled neither manufacturing quality nor installation timelines — the two things renovation customers complain about most — so in December 2015 the company launched its own private-label modular kitchens and wardrobes and began building manufacturing capability, converting itself from a pure marketplace into a full-stack operator that owns production and installation. That decision bought control, but it also meant Livspace now carried factory and working-capital costs that a lead-generation marketplace never would.

Those costs collided with COVID-19. Livspace was running at roughly $18–20 million in monthly revenue in March 2020 when the national lockdown shut its experience centres and stalled last-mile installation work; the company laid off about 450 employees, roughly 15% of its workforce, in May 2020, and its founders and leadership team took pay cuts of up to 70% to conserve cash, according to contemporaneous reporting. Revenue for the full year, FY21, came in at Rs 368 crore with a net loss of Rs 416 crore (Entrackr, February 2023). The recovery that followed pandemic reopening was real — the company reported roughly four-times-faster month-on-month recovery from May 2020 and crossed 5,100 completed homes as demand returned — but the underlying economics did not improve immediately. In fact they got worse: FY22 revenue from operations grew 54.9% to Rs 570 crore, but the net loss grew even faster, up 55% to Rs 645.2 crore, as marketing spend nearly quadrupled to Rs 164 crore chasing the post-pandemic renovation wave. On a unit basis, Livspace was spending Rs 2.13 to generate every rupee of operating revenue that year — its worst-ever cost ratio (Entrackr, February 2023). Losses widened again in FY23, to Rs 762.8 crore on revenue from operations of Rs 981 crore, an EBITDA margin of roughly minus 69% (Entrackr, September 2024). In March 2023 the company cut close to 100 more jobs to rein in costs, and that same spring, according to Entrackr’s reporting (May 2023), Livspace was in advanced talks — with terms reportedly being finalised — to acquire its closest full-stack rival, HomeLane, in a stock-heavy deal that would have created what the two companies internally called “the largest home interior and design space in the phygital space.” HomeLane was valued at around $250 million in those discussions; both companies were loss-making at the time (HomeLane’s FY22 loss was Rs 153 crore against Rs 426 crore of revenue). The deal was never confirmed and did not close.

The turning point

The real inflection was not the funding round that made Livspace a unicorn — it was the year after. Through FY21, FY22 and FY23, Livspace’s losses climbed in three straight years, from Rs 416 crore to Rs 645.2 crore to Rs 762.8 crore, even as revenue grew. That run peaked in FY23 with an EBITDA margin of about minus 69%. Then, in the results Livspace reported for FY24, the trend reversed for the first time: revenue from operations rose 20.9% to Rs 1,185.7 crore, but the net loss fell 45.75% to Rs 413.8 crore and the EBITDA margin improved to roughly minus 27% (Entrackr, September 2024). It was the first year Livspace demonstrated that growth and shrinking losses could happen together rather than as a trade-off, and it set up two further years of the same pattern: FY25 revenue rose another 23% to Rs 1,460 crore while the net loss narrowed again, to about Rs 242 crore, and the company’s own adjusted EBITDA loss — which strips out non-cash items such as employee stock costs — nearly halved to about Rs 131 crore from roughly Rs 246 crore a year earlier (Inc42, October 2025). That two-year run of shrinking losses is the evidence Livspace is now presenting to investors and, eventually, public-market shareholders, as it prepares to list.

The money behind it

Livspace’s capital came in stages that map neatly onto its own maturity. The $4.6 million Series A in December 2014 (Helion, Bessemer, Jungle Ventures) funded the original marketplace. A Series B in August 2016 brought in $15 million from Bessemer as the company built out its private-label manufacturing. A $70 million Series C in 2018, led by TPG Growth and Goldman Sachs, funded geographic expansion into Hyderabad, Chennai and Pune. In May 2019, Ingka Group Investments — the investment arm of Ingka Group, IKEA’s largest franchisee — took a stake tied to a broader partnership that helped Livspace open in Singapore that October; IKEA’s backing gave Livspace both capital and access to a much larger, more disciplined supply chain than a homegrown Indian modular-furniture business could build alone. A $90 million Series D in September 2020, led by Kharis Capital, Tahoe Investment Group and Venturi Partners, funded the company through the pandemic. Then, in February 2022, KKR led the $180 million Series F — alongside continuing investors Ingka, Jungle Ventures, Venturi Partners and Peugeot Investments — that pushed Livspace’s valuation past $1 billion and took cumulative funding to roughly $450 million (Bloomberg; BusinessToday/Entrackr, both February 2022). KKR’s capital and board involvement is what has since underwritten Livspace’s push toward an IPO rather than another private round. There has been no new priced funding round since; instead, ahead of the reverse-flip of its domicile to India, Livspace Pte Ltd in Singapore has been injecting rights-issue capital directly into its Indian operating subsidiary — Rs 362 crore in one tranche and a further tranche taking the cumulative infusion to around Rs 789 crore within the year to April 2025, at Rs 230 a share (Inc42, April 2025) — effectively pre-IPO working capital rather than a new valuation event. A company spokesperson has separately denied reports that Livspace was in talks for a fresh $100 million pre-IPO round.

How it makes money

Close to 94% of Livspace’s revenue comes from what it calls interior projects — the bundled design, manufacturing and installation fee a homeowner pays for a kitchen, wardrobe or full-home renovation; that share was 94% in FY24 and 93.7% in FY25 (Entrackr, September 2024 and October 2025). The rest comes from standalone product sales, contractual services and, increasingly, newer lines such as Livspace Care annual maintenance plans and tie-ups with banks for EMI and embedded financing on big-ticket projects. The part outsiders tend to get wrong is treating Livspace like a lead-generation marketplace that earns a thin commission and lets someone else carry the cost of the job. It does not: cost of sales — materials, manufacturing and execution — was Rs 706 crore in FY25, 40% of total expenditure of Rs 1,754 crore, because Livspace’s own factories make the furniture and its own project managers oversee installation (Entrackr, October 2025). That is also why marketing, at Rs 98 crore in FY25, is a comparatively small line relative to employee costs of Rs 590 crore, which itself includes Rs 106 crore of non-cash employee stock compensation. In other words, the two biggest levers Livspace has pulled to narrow its losses since FY23 have been headcount and manufacturing efficiency, not advertising discipline — marketing spend was actually cut 25% year-on-year in FY25 even as revenue grew 23%, but the bigger swing came from cost of sales growing slower than revenue and from trimming people costs, culminating in the roughly 1,000-role cut announced in February 2026.

The numbers

Figures are from Livspace’s consolidated annual financial statements filed by the group company in Singapore, as reported by Entrackr (February 2023, September 2024 and October 2025). Independent reporting by Inc42 (October 2025) puts the FY24 comparator net loss slightly higher, at Rs 461.7 crore, and the FY25 net loss at Rs 242.6 crore — both sources agree the loss roughly halved between FY24 and FY25, but the exact FY24 figure is contested between the two trackers.

Set against those losses, EBITDA margin moved from roughly minus 102.8% in FY22, to minus 69% in FY23, to minus 27% in FY24, to minus 13.4% in FY25 on a reported basis; on an adjusted basis — excluding items such as ESOP charges — Livspace says its FY25 adjusted EBITDA loss was about Rs 131 crore, down 47% from about Rs 246 crore in FY24 (Entrackr, October 2025; Inc42, October 2025). The company held cash reserves of about Rs 708 crore at the end of FY25 (Inc42, October 2025).

Where the money comes from

Geographically, India supplied about 85% of Livspace’s FY25 operating revenue, with Singapore contributing the remaining 15% (Entrackr, October 2025) — a reminder that despite a Singapore-domiciled holding structure built partly around the IKEA partnership, Livspace is overwhelmingly an Indian consumer business, which is also the logic behind its move to redomicile there ahead of listing on Indian exchanges. Within revenue lines, the surprise is not the dominance of interior projects — that is expected for a full-stack renovation company — but how small everything else still is after more than a decade: standalone product sales, marketplace commissions on trades such as electrical and plumbing work, and newer subscription and financing products together made up roughly 6% of FY25 revenue. Reported industry commentary suggests financing tie-ups have helped push average order values on full-home projects to around $12,000, and that Livspace Care maintenance plans were approaching 10% of urban revenue in some markets by 2025 — early signs of a shift toward higher-margin, recurring income, though neither of those figures yet shows up as a separately reported line in the company’s own filings.

The risks

The first risk is that Livspace is still burning cash after four straight years of narrowing losses. FY25’s net loss was about Rs 242 crore and its adjusted EBITDA loss about Rs 131 crore against cash reserves of roughly Rs 708 crore — a shrinking but real burn, at a company that Entrackr’s own reporting on the February 2026 job cuts said had gone through a “prolonged lack of funding” over four years with no confirmed new priced round since 2022. An IPO delayed or priced below expectations would tighten that runway further.

The second is structural to the full-stack model itself: because Livspace manufactures and installs rather than merely referring customers to a contractor, delays, quality misses and cost overruns land on its own balance sheet and reputation, not a third party’s. Cost of sales — Rs 706 crore in FY25, 40% of total spend — is the clearest evidence of how much of the business is manufacturing and logistics rather than software. The abortive 2023 talks to acquire HomeLane, then a $250-million-valued but also loss-making rival, showed that even the two largest full-stack players in Indian home interiors were each struggling to make the model profitable independently.

The third is cyclicality and market concentration: 85% of FY25 revenue came from India alone, and home renovation is a discretionary, big-ticket purchase tied to housing transactions, urban incomes and consumer confidence — a slowdown in any of those, or a rise in financing costs that discourages EMI-funded projects, would hit a company still not consistently profitable harder than one with an established cash cushion.

The takeaway

Livspace’s own numbers make an uncomfortable but useful point: the funding round that made headlines — the $180 million KKR round and the unicorn tag that came with it in February 2022 — did not fix the underlying economics. Losses actually got worse for another year after that round closed. What changed the trajectory, starting in FY24, was slower, less newsworthy work: cutting marketing spend relative to revenue, improving manufacturing cost per project, and eventually cutting headcount by roughly 1,000 roles in 2026. The lesson generalises well beyond one home-interiors company: a large funding round buys time and credibility, but it is not itself a fix for a broken cost structure — the fix, when it comes, usually shows up a year or two later in the boring line items, not in the round that made the news.

Frequently asked questions

Is Livspace profitable?

No. Livspace reported a net loss of about Rs 242 crore in FY25 on revenue from operations of Rs 1,460 crore, though its reported adjusted EBITDA loss narrowed to about Rs 131 crore, down 47% from the year before (Entrackr; Inc42, October 2025).

What is Livspace’s current valuation?

Its most recent public marker is $1.2 billion, reported after the $180 million Series F round led by KKR in February 2022 (Bloomberg; BusinessToday/Entrackr, February 2022). There has been no confirmed new priced round since, so this figure is dated and could differ materially if a fresh round or the IPO reprices the company.

Is Livspace going public?

It is preparing to. The company has been reverse-flipping its corporate domicile from Singapore to India, backed by rights-issue capital of roughly Rs 789 crore from its Singapore parent as of April 2025, and CEO Ramakant Sharma has said Livspace is targeting an IPO by late 2025 or 2026, subject to regulatory approvals (Inc42, April 2025 and October 2025).

How does Livspace make money?

Almost 94% of revenue comes from bundled interior-project fees covering design, in-house modular manufacturing and installation. The remainder comes from standalone product sales, marketplace commissions on allied trades, and newer subscription-maintenance and embedded-financing products (Entrackr, September 2024 and October 2025).

Why did Livspace lay off about 1,000 employees in 2026?

In February 2026, Livspace cut roughly 1,000 roles — about 12% of its workforce by its own account — alongside the exit of co-founder Saurabh Jain after 11 years. The company described it as a reallocation of resources driven by AI and automation; Entrackr’s reporting attributed it also to prolonged funding pressure and the absence of a clear path to profitability (Entrackr, February 2026).

Sources

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

• Entrackr, “Livspace turns unicorn after a $180 Mn Series F round,” February 2022
• BusinessToday, “Livspace fifth unicorn of 2022; raises $180 mn led by KKR,” February 2022
• Bloomberg, “KKR Leads $180 Million Round for Ikea-Backed Unicorn Livspace,” February 2022
• Business Standard, “Ikea-backed Livspace turns unicorn with $180 million KKR-led funding,” February 2022
• Entrackr, “Livspace’s losses cross Rs 645 Cr in FY22,” February 2023
• Entrackr, “Livspace revenue crosses Rs 1,200 Cr in FY24; losses shrink by 48%,” September 2024
• YourStory, “Livspace narrows FY24 EBITDA losses, eyes profitability by year-end,” September 2024
• Entrackr/Fintrackr, “Livspace posts Rs 1,460 Cr revenue in FY25; losses shrink 42%,” October 2025
• Inc42, “IPO-Bound Livspace Claims Adjusted EBITDA Loss Halved in FY25,” October 2025
• Entrackr, “Livspace lays off 1,000 employees amid co-founder exit and AI shift,” February 2026
• Entrackr, “Livspace lays off 15% of its workforce to conserve capital,” May 2020
• Inc42, “Livspace Lays Off 450 Employees As Covid-19 Hurts Business,” May 2020
• YourStory, “Despite seeing a slump, home interior startup Livspace stood strong and grew its business during the pandemic,” March 2021
• Entrackr, “Exclusive: Livspace in talks to acquire HomeLane,” May 2023
• Inc42, “Exclusive: With Reverse Flip In Cart, Livspace Nets INR 427 Cr From Singapore Parent,” April 2025
• Inc42, “Exclusive: Livspace Parent Infuses INR 362 Cr Into Indian Arm,” 2025
• Wikipedia, “Livspace” (founding, funding-round and expansion history), accessed September 2026
• TechCrunch, “India’s Livspace raises $70M for its one-stop-shop for interior design,” September 2018

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