Startup Deep Dive : Settl — how a mid-pandemic co-living bet reached Rs 31 crore in revenue

Settl began in the month co-living looked finished: July 2020, deep in the pandemic, when the shared-room product its founders had spent years building at Nestaway was exactly what frightened tenants were fleeing. Four years on, the company’s operating revenue had reached ₹31.3 crore in FY24 (about $3.3 million), more than doubling from the year before, spread across roughly 4,000 beds in four cities.

That is the contradiction worth sitting with. A business whose entire premise is strangers safely sharing a flat was started in the one year when sharing a flat felt dangerous, by three managers who had just watched their previous employer’s rental model come under strain. The founders bet that the pandemic would empty cities briefly and refill them fast, and that the people coming back — young workers, far from home, tired of broker games and unfurnished rooms — would pay a premium for a bed that came with power backup, Wi-Fi and no deposit theatre. This is the story of whether that bet paid, told through the filings, the funding and the numbers Settl has actually disclosed.

Quick facts

What Settl actually does

Settl rents fully furnished beds to working professionals in Indian metros, and manages the property so the tenant never has to. It does not own the buildings. It signs long-term leases with landlords and builders, furnishes and fits out the units, then re-lets them bed by bed on all-inclusive monthly rents. The pitch to a 25-year-old who has just moved cities for a job: move in the same day, no security-deposit haggling with a broker, no separate bills for internet, power backup, water or cooking gas.

• Product: shared apartments, individual private rooms and PG-style co-living centres, all furnished and serviced (cleaning, maintenance, 24×7 power backup, Wi-Fi).
• Customer: primarily working professionals; monthly rent quoted at ₹12,500–₹18,000 per bed (company-stated, early 2024).
• Footprint (early 2024): 60+ co-living centres across Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Gurugram and Chennai; ~4,000 beds over roughly 1.5 million sq ft (company-stated).
• Model: asset-light — Settl controls inventory through leases, not ownership, which lets it add beds without buying real estate.

The founding insight

The three founders — Abhishek Tripathi, Bharath Bhaskar and Ashok Reddy — did not come to co-living cold. All three had worked at Nestaway, the Bengaluru home-rental startup that spent the late 2010s trying to industrialise India’s chaotic rental market, and that in 2019 had pushed into managed co-living under a separate brand. They had watched, from the inside, both the demand and the operational pain: young migrants desperate for a clean, ready room, and landlords who could not or would not furnish, service and fill those rooms themselves.

The insight was less about the product than the timing and the format. India’s organised co-living supply was tiny against the need — later industry estimates would put national demand near 6.6 million beds against organised supply of roughly 300,000, a gap of more than twentyfold (NOESIS). The founders reasoned that the pandemic exodus from cities was temporary, that migration would resume, and that the returning worker would not want to relive the old ritual of brokers, deposits and empty rooms. So in July 2020, in stealth, they leased their first buildings in Bangalore and quietly locked in more than 300 beds before making any noise about it.

The struggle years

The early problems were structural, not cosmetic. A managed-co-living operator carries a lease-shaped liability: it commits to pay landlords whether or not the beds fill, and in 2020–21 the beds did not reliably fill. Occupancy is the entire game, and a pandemic is the worst enemy of occupancy in shared housing.

• Launch timing: Settl opened during a period when co-living and PG demand had collapsed as students went home and offices shut, forcing the company to prove the model in its hardest possible market.
• Thin margins from day one: in FY23 the company spent about ₹1.14 to earn each ₹1 of operating revenue (Entrackr, from filings) — a business still buying its growth rather than funding it.
• Persistent losses: loss before tax was ₹3.16 crore in FY22 and ₹2.2 crore in FY23 (Entrackr). The loss narrowed, but the company had not reached profitability on the numbers disclosed.
• Cost creep with scale: FY23 employee-benefit expense jumped to ₹3.25 crore from about ₹82 lakh in FY22 as the team grew, and “other expenses” rose ~87% to ₹18.54 crore — costs that scale with beds under management.

None of this is unusual for asset-light co-living; the entire category runs on the hope that occupancy and rent per bed eventually outrun fixed lease and fit-out costs. Settl spent its first years testing whether that hope held in the wreckage of a demand shock.

The turning point

The turn was the return itself. As cities refilled through 2022 and 2023, the beds Settl had locked in during the quiet years started to pay, and the numbers on either side of the pivot are stark. Revenue moved from ₹6.36 crore in FY22 to ₹16.33 crore in FY23 — roughly 2.5 times in a single year (Entrackr) — and then to ₹31.3 crore in FY24, up about 103.8% year on year (Inc42/Tracxn).

Crucially, the loss did not balloon alongside the growth. Loss before tax actually shrank from ₹3.16 crore (FY22) to ₹2.2 crore (FY23) even as revenue more than doubled, the first evidence that the model’s unit economics were bending the right way as beds filled. That combination — revenue roughly doubling while losses narrowed — is what let the founders go back to investors in early 2024 and raise a larger round to expand into more cities rather than to survive.

The money behind it

Settl is a lightly funded company by startup standards, and deliberately so — an asset-light operator needs working capital and fit-out money, not the war chests of an inventory-owning rival. The funding history, as reported:

• Angel/seed (November 2021): about $500K from ah! Ventures, We Founder Circle and others; the company was reported at roughly ₹30 crore valuation after its September 2021 raise.
• Pre-Series A (January 2024): ₹10 crore, led by Gruhas and We Founder Circle.
• Pre-Series A participants: Anthill Ventures, Inflection Point Ventures, ah! Ventures, Nila Spaces Limited, Soonicorn Ventures, Awficacy Capital, Pai Ventures LLP and Ekyum.
• Total raised: about ₹15 crore cumulatively (company-stated, Indian press); data trackers put lifetime funding at roughly $1.7–2.55 million (Inc42 / Tracxn) — the figures differ because they count rounds and angel cheques differently.

What each backer changed is less about brand-name validation and more about capital cadence: the 2021 seed proved the model could survive the pandemic, and the 2024 pre-Series A — with real-estate-linked names such as Gruhas and Nila Spaces on the cap table — funded the jump from three cities to four and the stated target of 5,000 beds. The latest valuation has not been publicly refreshed, so any figure beyond the reported ~₹30 crore should be treated as unknown rather than assumed.

How it makes money

The economics are a spread business dressed up as hospitality. Settl’s job is to lease space cheaply, fill it densely, and charge each bed more than its share of the lease-plus-service cost.

• Money in: all-inclusive monthly rent per bed (₹12,500–₹18,000, company-stated), bundling rent, utilities, internet, power backup and housekeeping into one number.
• Money out: fixed lease payments to landlords, one-time furnishing and fit-out capital per property, plus recurring staff, maintenance and utility costs.
• Where the margin sits: in the gap between what a bed earns at high occupancy and its allocated lease-plus-service cost — which is why occupancy percentage, not headline revenue, is the number that decides profit.
• The take: because Settl re-lets bed by bed, one leased apartment can carry three or four paying tenants, so revenue per property can exceed the single rent Settl pays for it — provided the beds stay full.
• The part people get wrong: co-living is not a real-estate play, it is an operations-and-occupancy play. Settl owns no buildings; its risk is a lease it must pay whether or not the last bed is sold, and its FY23 figure of ₹1.14 spent per ₹1 earned shows how tight that spread still was.

The numbers

Three years of disclosed figures (₹ crore; operating revenue and loss before tax). Where sources give slightly different FY23 revenue, both are noted.

• Revenue trajectory: ₹6.36 cr (FY22) → ₹16.33 cr (FY23) → ₹31.3 cr (FY24), roughly doubling in each of the last two years.
• FY24 growth: about 103.8% YoY on the Inc42/Tracxn revenue figures.
• FY23 cost stack (Entrackr): total expenditure ~₹18.5 crore, of which cost of services ₹9.68 crore (up ~36% YoY), employee benefits ₹3.25 crore, finance cost ₹33 lakh.
• Loss trend: narrowing — ₹3.16 cr (FY22) to ₹2.2 cr (FY23), down ~30.4%, even as revenue rose.

Where the money comes from

Settl does not publish an audited city-by-city or product-by-product revenue split, so the segmentation below is drawn from its operating disclosures rather than from a formal segment report. The honest picture is a business concentrated in a handful of tech-heavy metros.

• Geography: four cities — Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Gurugram and Chennai — with Bengaluru the founding and anchor market; earlier disclosures (FY23) covered Bangalore, Hyderabad and Gurugram before Chennai was added.
• Bed scale-up: from 300+ beds at launch (July 2020) to ~2,000 beds across 40 centres by mid-2023 (Bangalore, Hyderabad, Gurugram), to ~4,000 beds across 60+ centres by early 2024 — the bed count is effectively the revenue engine.
• Customer mix: skewed to working professionals rather than students, which ties demand to office-return and hiring cycles in IT and services hubs.
• The surprise: revenue is a direct function of occupied beds, so growth has come far more from adding and filling inventory than from raising rent — the per-bed price band (₹12,500–₹18,000) has stayed roughly constant while bed count multiplied more than tenfold.

The risks

The risks are the flip side of the asset-light model, and each has a clear mechanism.

• Occupancy and fixed-lease risk: Settl owes landlords rent regardless of how many beds are filled. A demand dip — a hiring freeze, a work-from-home shift, another health shock — hits revenue immediately while lease costs stay fixed, exactly the squeeze the FY22–FY23 losses reflect.
• Thin, unproven profitability: on disclosed numbers the company was still loss-making (₹2.2 crore before tax in FY23) and spending ₹1.14 to earn ₹1; if the spread between rent collected and lease-plus-service cost does not widen with scale, growth simply enlarges the losses.
• Well-capitalised competition: rivals such as Stanza Living (about $232 million raised), Zolo (~$113 million) and Colive have far deeper funding than Settl’s roughly ₹15 crore, letting them lock up prime buildings and outspend on fit-out and marketing in the same metros.
• Concentration: four cities and a professionals-heavy tenant base mean a downturn in a single hub such as Bengaluru or Gurugram, or in tech hiring generally, would flow straight through to occupancy.

The takeaway

The transferable lesson from Settl is about counter-cyclical timing paired with a light balance sheet. Starting a shared-housing company mid-pandemic looks reckless until you notice what it bought: cheaper leases from anxious landlords, less competition for buildings, and a running start on inventory that was already filling by the time demand snapped back. Because Settl leased rather than owned, the downside of being early was survivable — a lease can be renegotiated or exited in a way a purchased building cannot. The company has not yet proved it can turn a profit, and it remains small beside its funded rivals. But its path shows that in a category defined by a vast supply gap, the operator who quietly secures and fills inventory when everyone else is retreating can compound faster than the one who waits for the market to feel safe.

Frequently asked questions

What is Settl and what does it do?

Settl is an asset-light managed co-living operator. It leases residential properties, furnishes and services them, and re-lets them bed by bed to working professionals on all-inclusive monthly rents that bundle utilities, internet, power backup and housekeeping. As of early 2024 it operated about 4,000 beds across 60-plus centres in Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Gurugram and Chennai.

Who founded Settl and when?

Settl was founded by Abhishek Tripathi, Bharath Bhaskar and Ashok Reddy, all former Nestaway employees. The brand launched in July 2020; its operating company, Samasth Living Private Limited, was incorporated on 22 November 2019 in Karnataka.

How much money has Settl raised?

Settl has raised roughly ₹15 crore cumulatively (company-stated), including a ₹10 crore pre-Series A round in January 2024 led by Gruhas and We Founder Circle. Data trackers put lifetime funding at around $1.7–2.55 million; the figures differ by how angel cheques and rounds are counted.

Is Settl profitable?

On the latest disclosed filings it was not. Settl reported a loss before tax of ₹2.2 crore in FY23, narrowed from ₹3.16 crore in FY22, even as revenue more than doubled. A FY24 profit-or-loss figure was not available in the sources reviewed for this piece.

How does Settl differ from renting a normal flat or PG?

Settl bundles rent, utilities, internet, power backup and maintenance into one monthly per-bed price (reported at ₹12,500–₹18,000), offers furnished move-in-ready rooms, and removes the broker-and-deposit friction of the traditional rental market. It owns no buildings; it manages leased ones, which is how it can add beds quickly across cities.

Sources

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

• Entrackr — “Unpacking Settl’s FY23 financial numbers” (July 2023)
• Entrackr — “Co-living startup Settl raises Rs 10 Cr in pre-series A round” (January 2024)
• Inc42 — Settl company profile: funding, revenue and investors (2026)
• Tracxn — Settl and Samasth Living Private Limited company profiles (2026)
• Outlook Startup — “Co-Living Start-Up Settl. Raises Rs 10 Crore from Investors for Expansion” (January 2024)
• Business Standard — “From Settl. to Colive, co-living startups find room to double capacity” (March 2024)
• The Week / PR Newswire — “Bangalore-based Settl. announces its entry in India’s co-living market” (November 2020)
• IndianWeb2 — “Co-living Startup Settl Raises $500K in Seed Round” (November 2021)
• Colliers India — press release on India’s co-living segment and 2030 outlook (2025)
• NOESIS — India co-living demand vs organised supply estimate (2025)

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