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Startup Deep Dive : Skootr — how it built 3.5 million sq ft of office space on $1.67 million of outside funding

The Invincible India Startup Deep Dive featured graphic for Skootr.

Skootr has raised just $1.67 million in outside funding across its entire life, according to Tracxn — a rounding error next to the hundreds of millions that rival flexible-workspace operators have taken from venture investors. Yet by 2024 it had built out 3.5 million square feet of managed office space across 80 offices in seven Indian cities, and founders still hold 88.45% of the company, per Tracxn’s ownership data.

That combination — a nine-figure real-estate footprint funded almost entirely off client cash flow and landlord leases rather than investor capital — is the puzzle at the centre of Skootr’s story. This piece traces how a Gurugram startup that began by renting desks to small businesses ended up designing offices for BMW, IKEA, American Express and The Economist Group, what its filed numbers actually show, and where the model could crack.

Quick facts

Company Skootr Global Private Limited, operating as Skootr
Founded 2015 in Gurugram; incorporated as Skootr Global Private Limited on 27 January 2016
Founders Puneet Chandra, Anuj Saxena, Ankit Jain
Businesses Skootr (managed/flexible enterprise office space); Skootr FinSave (workspace fit-out financing, launched 2021)
Latest FY revenue ₹100–500 crore ($10.4–52.1 million) for the year to 31 March 2025, as a disclosed range, per Tracxn
Latest FY profit/loss Not separately disclosed for FY25; the year to 31 March 2023 showed a 26.62% net profit margin, per Tofler
Listed Private; no IPO to date
Market value / last valuation Not publicly disclosed; last funding round closed 26 February 2021, amount undisclosed
Key shareholders / CEO Puneet Chandra (co-founder and CEO); founders hold 88.45% collectively, per Tracxn

What they do

Skootr leases large blocks of space from developers and landlords, fits them out to a corporate-grade standard, and hands them to enterprise tenants as a single monthly service that bundles rent, design, IT infrastructure, food and beverage, housekeeping, security and community management — a model the company calls “space as a service.” Its client list runs toward large corporates and multinationals rather than freelancers or small teams: disclosed tenants include BMW, IKEA, American Express, Macquarie, Expedia, The Economist Group, Ingersoll Rand, Grant Thornton, Siemens Healthcare, Claranet, Futures First and Clix Capital, drawn from the company’s own about-us page and past press coverage. A newer unit, Skootr FinSave, extends the same logic to office fit-outs themselves, letting client companies pay for interiors as a recurring, tax-deductible service rather than a one-time capital outlay, per YourStory’s July 2021 report on the launch.

The origin

Puneet Chandra, who holds an MBA from ITM Gwalior and had earlier founded an IT services company called Bcube, started Skootr in Gurugram in 2015 with two friends: college friend Ankit Jain and school friend Anuj Saxena, who brought more than 15 years of interior-design experience and had worked with over 300 design firms on more than 1.6 million square feet of office space, according to YourStory’s account of the founding. The legal entity, Skootr Global Private Limited, was incorporated on 27 January 2016, per its Ministry of Corporate Affairs record as compiled by Tofler.

The founding insight was less about coworking’s shared-desk fad and more about a gap in how Indian companies leased office space at all: a tenant renting a bare-shell floor still had to independently arrange interiors, furniture, IT cabling, F&B and facilities staff, tying up capital and management time that had nothing to do with its actual business. Skootr’s bet was to fold all of that into one lease-and-service contract, effectively becoming an intermediary landlord that took on the real-estate and build-out risk so client companies didn’t have to.

The struggle years

The early version of that idea did not immediately work. Skootr launched serving small and medium enterprises, and within about two years the founders concluded that SME tenants alone could not generate the kind of returns commercial real estate demands — rents and occupancy at that end of the market were too thin and too unreliable to justify the capital Skootr was sinking into every fit-out, per YourStory’s reporting on the company’s early years. That realisation forced a hard repositioning: away from small, price-sensitive tenants and toward large corporates and multinationals who would sign longer, higher-value contracts, even though it meant starting the client-relationship-building process over almost from scratch.

A second, more recent strain shows up in the company’s own disclosed numbers rather than in a founder’s retelling: Tracxn’s data puts Skootr’s headcount at 312 as of 31 May 2025, down 11% year-on-year — a contraction that sits oddly next to a company simultaneously telling the trade press it plans to add another 5 million square feet of space and spend ₹1,000 crore doing it through the 2028 financial year, per The Realty Today’s coverage, updated 18 May 2024. Neither Skootr nor its trackers have explained the headcount drop publicly; it is simply a data point worth holding alongside the expansion headlines.

The turning point

The pivot away from SME clients crystallised around a single deal: Skootr secured roughly 50,000 square feet of space inside a DLF property, a contract large and prestigious enough to reposition the company as an enterprise-grade operator rather than a budget coworking outfit, per YourStory’s account. The before-and-after is visible in two separate outside snapshots of the business. An early company profile — by its own account taken about a year and a half after the 2015 founding — described just seven facilities across four cities, roughly 150,000 square feet, about 2,500 seats and an annualised revenue run rate of around $4 million, per SiliconIndia’s feature on the company. By January 2020, after the shift to enterprise anchors, YourStory reported Skootr running close to 500,000 square feet across a dozen-plus centres in Gurugram, Noida, Jaipur and Mumbai, approaching $1 million in monthly turnover, growing 100% year-on-year, and profitable at the PAT line since inception. The scale-up between those two snapshots — in square footage, seat count and reported turnover — is the clearest evidence that the SME-to-enterprise pivot, not the founding idea itself, is what actually built the business.

The money behind it

The upshot is a company whose real-estate scale was funded mainly through landlord leases and client cash flow rather than venture rounds — a genuinely unusual capital structure for a business this asset-heavy.

How it makes money

The numbers

Skootr’s ownership structure means it has never had to publish the kind of granular, audited annual results a listed company or a well-funded unicorn would. What is on the public record comes from a small number of dated snapshots rather than a clean multi-year run, and this piece reports only what those snapshots actually say rather than smoothing the gaps between them.

Period Revenue Profit/loss indicator Source
~2016–17 (about 18 months post-founding) ~$4 million annualised run rate Not disclosed SiliconIndia company profile
January 2020 Approaching $1 million in monthly turnover, up 100% year-on-year Profitable at the PAT line since inception (company-stated) YourStory, January 2020
FY23 (year to 31 March 2023) ₹100–150 crore (disclosed range) 21.0% operating margin; 26.62% net profit margin Tofler (RoC-linked filing)
FY25 (as of 31 March 2025) ₹100–500 crore (disclosed range) Not separately disclosed Tracxn

Read together, the direction is unmistakably upward — from a single-digit-million-dollar run rate in its first two years to a revenue band that, even at the low end of the FY25 range, is several multiples larger. But the width of the FY25 band (₹100–500 crore) means this piece cannot responsibly state a precise current revenue figure, and it has not tried to.

Where the money comes from

The surprising part is geographic: a company founded and headquartered in Gurugram is now putting its single largest slice of new capital into Bengaluru, not the Delhi-NCR market it grew up in — a bet that tracks the concentration of technology and global-capability-centre office demand more than it tracks Skootr’s own roots.

The risks

The takeaway

Skootr’s most transferable lesson has nothing to do with office design or coworking amenities. It is that in a capital-intensive category, getting the unit economics right — the spread between what you pay a landlord and what a client will pay you for a fully serviced product — can matter more than how much venture money you can raise to paper over a broken model. Skootr spent its first two years serving the wrong customer segment at margins that could never scale, and no amount of funding would have fixed that; what fixed it was recognising the mismatch and rebuilding the client base around it. The company’s $1.67 million in lifetime outside funding, against a 3.5-million-square-foot footprint, is really a story about sequencing: prove the model works for the right customer before asking anyone else to fund the version that scales.

Frequently asked questions

Who founded Skootr and when?

Skootr was founded in Gurugram in 2015 by Puneet Chandra, Ankit Jain and Anuj Saxena, and the company was legally incorporated as Skootr Global Private Limited on 27 January 2016, per YourStory and Tofler’s filing record.

What does Skootr actually sell?

Skootr leases office space from landlords, fits it out, and provides it to large corporate and multinational clients as a single bundled monthly service covering rent, design, IT, food and beverage, housekeeping, security and community management, rather than a bare-shell lease.

How much funding has Skootr raised, and who backed it?

Skootr has raised a total of $1.67 million across two rounds — an angel round on 10 November 2017 including investors Mayank Paraswani and Gagan Suryavanshi, and a seed round on 26 February 2021 — with founders still holding 88.45% of the company, per Tracxn.

Is Skootr profitable?

Skootr reported being profitable at the PAT level since inception as of January 2020, per YourStory, and its FY23 filings (year to 31 March 2023) show a 26.62% net profit margin, per Tofler. More recent, precise profit figures have not been publicly disclosed.

What is Skootr FinSave?

Skootr FinSave is a fit-out financing vertical launched around mid-2021 that lets client companies pay for office interiors as a recurring, tax-deductible service instead of a one-time capital expense; at launch it was targeting ₹200 crore in revenue for FY22, per YourStory.

Sources

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

Found an error? Write to us and we’ll correct it in the open, dated, on the piece.

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