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Startup Deep Dive : Square Yards — the loan-selling machine hiding inside a property site

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The Invincible India Startup Deep Dive featured graphic for Square Yards.

Square Yards closed FY26 with Rs 2,086 crore ($217 million, at $1 ≈ Rs 96.0 as of 18 September 2026, Trading Economics) in revenue, up 48% in a single year. Most people who have heard the name still think of it as a property listing website, one more app for browsing flats in Gurugram or Dubai.

That description stopped being accurate some time ago. On the company’s own numbers, six of every ten rupees it now earns come from selling home loans, not real estate — and the business almost did not survive long enough to find that out, having lost Rs 225 crore against Rs 382 crore of revenue as recently as FY22.

Quick facts

Company Square Yards (Square Yards Consulting Pvt. Ltd.)
Founded 2013, in Hong Kong; India-focused operations from 2014
Founder(s) Tanuj Shori (CEO) and Kanika Gupta Shori (COO)
Businesses Real estate brokerage, mortgage and loan distribution (Urban Money), rental/property management (Azuro), 3D and VR visualisation (PropVR), home interiors (Interior Company)
Latest FY revenue Rs 2,086 crore, FY26 (year ended March 2026), up 48% year-on-year
Latest FY profit/loss EBITDA profit of Rs 176 crore, an 8% margin, in FY26 (company-reported); net profit after tax has not been publicly disclosed
Listed Private; DRHP not yet filed as of 13 September 2026
Market value / last valuation Crossed $1 billion in June 2026; reportedly in talks near $1.6 billion; IPO target valuation reported anywhere between roughly $920 million and $2 billion, depending on the source
Key shareholders / backers Founders Tanuj Shori and Kanika Gupta Shori; investors include BCCL, Genkai Capital, Smilegate, EAAA Alternatives and Muzinich & Co

What they do

Square Yards sells property, and then it sells almost everything that comes attached to owning one. A homebuyer can search a flat on its platform, book it, get the home loan arranged through its lending arm Urban Money, hand over the interiors to Interior Company, and later put the same flat on rent and have it managed through Azuro. The company calls this the “full-stack” model: instead of taking a cut on one transaction, it tries to stay in the customer’s life across the entire ownership cycle. Its core customers are first-time homebuyers in India’s large cities, non-resident Indians buying property from the Gulf, Australia and Canada, and, on the supply side, roughly 700-plus real estate developers and 95-plus banks and non-bank lenders whose inventory and loan products it distributes through a network of brokers and in-house sales staff.

The origin

Tanuj Shori was an investment banker in Hong Kong — he holds an MBA from IIM Lucknow and had worked his way up to executive director at Nomura, as per Inc42’s reporting. Kanika Gupta Shori, a Wharton MBA, had spent more than a decade across asset management and entertainment. Living in Hong Kong as an NRI couple, they wanted to invest in Indian property from abroad and found the process opaque: a market Inc42 later described the couple sizing up as a $120 billion industry where the largest developer held about 1% market share, some 500,000 small brokers operated with no regulator and no data transparency, and no single distributor existed at any scale. That gap — not a piece of new technology, but the absence of anyone organising a fragmented, trust-starved market — was the founding insight. They started the company in 2013 with a large founding team, reportedly around 20 co-founders, and treated it, in Shori’s own words, as a six-month experiment.

The struggle years

The six-month experiment did not go as planned. Running the business out of Hong Kong meant selling Indian property to developers and buyers from outside the market, and the company met, as Shori has described it, “little acceptance from developers” and unreliable local partners. Within roughly a year, the founders shifted their base from Hong Kong to India, rebuilding the operation on the ground rather than at a distance — the first hard pivot.

The second shock was external and hit the entire industry: demonetisation in November 2016, followed by the Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act rolling out through 2017, eliminated much of the cash that had greased property deals for decades and pushed debt-laden developers into a cash crunch. Real estate prices fell and the broker-driven sales model Square Yards depended on came under direct regulatory scrutiny; the company had to make itself RERA-compliant across ten states to keep operating credibly as a broker network, at a time when a large share of India’s unorganised brokers were being squeezed out.

The clearest near-death moment, though, is in the accounts. In FY22, Square Yards lost Rs 225 crore against Rs 382 crore of revenue — a loss that had jumped 2.76 times over the previous year, according to Entrackr’s reporting of the company’s Registrar of Companies filings. Losing nearly 59 paise on every rupee of revenue, while scaling fast, is the point at which a lot of startups run out of runway rather than the point at which they call it a “growth phase.” FY23 revenue grew a further 74% to Rs 664 crore, but the loss still grew alongside it, to Rs 256 crore.

The turning point

The turn came in the fourth quarter of FY23, January to March 2023, which Entrackr’s reporting flagged as the first quarter in the company’s history that was operationally profitable. That is the hinge: before it, a business that had just posted a Rs 225 crore annual loss on Rs 382 crore of revenue (FY22); after it, a business that reached Rs 46 crore of full-year EBITDA profit on Rs 1,410 crore of revenue by FY25, and Rs 176 crore of EBITDA profit on Rs 2,086 crore of revenue, an 8% margin, by FY26 — a margin that had been roughly 3% just one year earlier. Six consecutive profitable quarters later, the company had enough of a track record to raise growth capital at a unicorn valuation and start talking seriously to IPO bankers.

The money behind it

Square Yards’ funding shape has been unusually slow-burning for a company its size: a $6 million pre-Series A in 2015 from Singapore and Hong Kong-based investors, then a roughly six-year gap before headline raises, according to Wikipedia’s summary of the company’s history and multiple contemporaneous reports. In 2019, it raised about $20 million from Bennett Coleman & Co (BCCL, the Times Group) and Genkai Capital — BCCL’s investment brought both capital and a large media-and-advertising relationship at a time the company needed distribution more than cash. The bigger shift came far later: in late 2025 it raised $35 million from South Korea’s Smilegate group, and then, on 23 June 2026, it raised Rs 900 crore (about $95 million) in a mix of debt and equity anchored by EAAA Alternatives with participation from global credit manager Muzinich & Co, pushing its valuation past $1 billion and formally into unicorn territory, as reported independently by both Entrackr and YourStory. Entrackr also reported the company was separately in talks for another $50-60 million at a valuation near $1.6 billion. Inc42’s IPO tracker (13 September 2026) puts total funding raised to date at about $200 million. Shori has said the June 2026 capital is meant to fund expansion, strengthen the technology stack, and prepare the company for its IPO.

How it makes money

The part most outsiders get wrong is thinking Square Yards earns like a listing portal, off advertising and subscriptions from developers. It largely does not. Roughly 5% or more of a property’s sale value flows to Square Yards as brokerage commission when it closes a primary or secondary transaction — that part is intuitive. What people miss is Urban Money, the lending distribution arm, which by FY26 accounted for around 60% of total revenue, more than the core real estate business, according to Inc42’s reporting. Urban Money does not lend its own money; it originates loans on behalf of more than 95 banks and NBFCs and earns a blended take rate of about 1.5% of the loan value as commission, carrying no balance-sheet or credit risk itself. It reaches customers mostly through a network of about 70,000 active broker and advisor partners, who earn an outsized incentive to sell financing alongside property: Square Yards’ own CFO has given the example of a broker earning Rs 1 lakh in brokerage on a Rs 1 crore flat sale, who can then earn another Rs 60,000-65,000 in commission simply by routing that buyer’s home loan through Urban Money too. About 55% of the company’s property customers now take a loan this way. Interiors and digital products — Azuro’s rental management, PropVR’s AI-based 3D walkthroughs, and data platform PropsAMC — make up the remaining, smaller slice.

The numbers

Five years of filings and company disclosures show revenue compounding fast while the bottom line moved from deep losses to modest EBITDA profit, though the company has not disclosed net profit after tax for the last three years:

Fiscal year Revenue (Rs crore) Profit / (loss) (Rs crore, as reported)
FY22 382 (225) net loss
FY23 664 (256) net loss
FY24 1,001 (25) EBITDA loss; net PAT not disclosed
FY25 1,410 46 EBITDA profit; net PAT not disclosed
FY26 2,086 176 EBITDA profit (8% margin); net PAT not disclosed

FY22 and FY23 figures are net losses drawn from the company’s Registrar of Companies filings, as reported by Entrackr. From FY24 onward the company has publicised EBITDA rather than net profit after tax, so the FY24-FY26 figures above are EBITDA, not the bottom line — a distinction worth holding onto, since EBITDA excludes depreciation, ESOP costs, interest and tax, all of which weighed on the company in its loss-making years.

Where the money comes from

By product, FY26 revenue split roughly 60% from loan origination and 40% from real estate services, per Inc42’s reporting of company disclosures; a year earlier, in FY24, mortgages and real estate together made up about 88% of revenue against 12% from interiors and digital products, which shows how quickly the fintech share has grown even within that combined bucket. By geography, India contributed about 83% of the business in FY25, with GCC countries (chiefly the UAE) contributing about 11% and the remainder from Australia and Canada; by FY26, international operations together made up about 12% of global revenue even as India itself grew 57% year-on-year. The surprise, then, is not that international expansion is small — proptech companies in India usually are India-first — but that within the international book, a Middle East NRI buyer base which started as the entire reason the company existed in 2013 has become a minority contributor to a business now dominated by a domestic lending engine.

The risks

The dependence on lending distribution cuts both ways. With about 60% of revenue and roughly 86% of Urban Money’s loan book tied to home loans, per Inc42’s reporting, Square Yards’ fortunes are now closely linked to RBI rate cycles and bank or NBFC risk appetite; a lending slowdown would hit the company harder than it would a pure brokerage.

The business also runs on relationships rather than owned assets: about 70,000 partner brokers and advisors carry the distribution, and Grade-A developer partnerships are reported to contribute around 85% of total business, per Inc42’s account of the company’s history. That is efficient when it works, but it means Square Yards does not control the customer relationship end to end, and a shift in commission structures, developer terms, or partner loyalty could move volume elsewhere quickly.

Finally, the numbers a public listing would be priced on are still thin by the standards of a $1 billion-plus valuation: net losses of Rs 225 crore and Rs 256 crore in FY22 and FY23, and an EBITDA margin that only reached 8% in FY26, with net profit after tax still undisclosed. Bankers and the company are reportedly targeting IPO valuations anywhere from about $920 million (Inc42’s IPO tracker, 13 September 2026) to $2 billion (Outlook Business), a gap wide enough to suggest the market has not yet agreed on what this business is worth.

The takeaway

Square Yards did not become what it is today by getting its first idea right. The idea it started with — helping NRIs buy Indian property from Hong Kong — barely survived its first year. What survived was the willingness to keep attaching new, adjacent revenue lines to an existing base of customers until one of them, mortgage distribution, grew past the business it was originally bolted onto. For any founder building around a single transaction, the lesson is not to guard that transaction more tightly but to watch what customers need immediately after it — that adjacent need can end up mattering more than the product that brought them in.

Frequently asked questions

What does Square Yards actually do?

It runs an integrated real estate platform covering property brokerage, home loan distribution through its Urban Money arm, interior design through Interior Company, and rental/property management through Azuro, serving buyers in India and NRIs in the Gulf, Australia and Canada.

Who founded Square Yards, and when?

Tanuj Shori and Kanika Gupta Shori founded it in 2013 while living in Hong Kong, moving the business’s base to India within about a year of starting.

Is Square Yards profitable?

It reported EBITDA profit of Rs 46 crore in FY25 and Rs 176 crore in FY26, an 8% margin, after net losses of Rs 225 crore and Rs 256 crore in FY22 and FY23. The company has not publicly disclosed net profit after tax for FY24 through FY26.

What is Square Yards worth, and is it going public?

It crossed a $1 billion valuation in a June 2026 fundraise and was reportedly in talks near $1.6 billion, per Entrackr. It has not filed a DRHP as of 13 September 2026 but has engaged Axis Capital, JP Morgan and BofA Securities as it prepares for an IPO targeted within the next one to two years.

How does Square Yards make most of its money?

Not primarily from real estate brokerage. In FY26, about 60% of its revenue came from originating home loans and other credit products through Urban Money, on a blended take rate of roughly 1.5% of loan value, more than it earned from property transactions themselves.

Sources

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

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