Startup Deep Dive : Stanza Living — profitable on paper, cut 28% in the same year

In FY25, Stanza Living told the market it had finally turned a profit: Rs 130 crore ($13.5 million, at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026, Trading Economics) net income, its first since launch. Look past the headline, though, and Rs 277 crore of that year’s total income was unexplained “other income” that the company’s own filings do not itemise, while the core rental business brought in Rs 545.5 crore against Rs 683 crore of expenses.

That gap between the story and the filing is the story of Stanza Living. This is a co-living operator that leases and manages more than 75,000 beds across roughly two dozen Indian cities, that watched its revenue crater by 44% in a single pandemic year, that clawed back to nearly Rs 600 crore in revenue within three years, and that then had its own investors mark its valuation down by 28% just as it declared victory. Founded in 2017 by Anindya Dutta and Sandeep Dalmia, Stanza Living is a case study in what it actually costs — in capital, in losses, in investor patience — to professionalise a market that Indian landlords and PG operators had run informally for decades.

Quick facts

What they do

Stanza Living rents out managed rooms and shared apartments to students and young working professionals in Indian cities, positioning itself as a branded, safety-checked alternative to the informal paying-guest (PG) and hostel market. A resident signs up for a furnished bed or room that comes bundled with meals, Wi-Fi, housekeeping, laundry, security and a resident-community layer, priced as a single monthly fee rather than the patchwork of rent, deposit, cook and cable-guy payments that an independent PG tenant would otherwise juggle. The company does not build or own most of the real estate it operates; it leases properties from landlords and developers, refits them to a common design and service standard, and then manages the day-to-day operations across a network that, as of the company’s October 2025 fundraising, spanned more than 75,000 beds in around 24 cities.

The origin

Anindya Dutta and Sandeep Dalmia founded Stanza Living in 2017 after careers that gave them opposite halves of the same insight. Dutta, an IIT Kharagpur and IIM Ahmedabad graduate, had worked as a real-estate investor at Oaktree Capital and earlier at Goldman Sachs in London, giving him a hard look at how institutional capital underwrites property risk. Dalmia, also an IIM Ahmedabad graduate with a Delhi College of Engineering degree, spent his prior career as a Principal at Boston Consulting Group across India, the US and Southeast Asia, the kind of role that trains someone to see an operating-model gap before a product one.

The gap they saw was specific: India’s student and young-professional housing market was almost entirely unorganised, run by individual PG owners and landlords with no consistent quality, safety or service standard, even though the underlying demand — students moving cities for college, young employees moving for their first jobs — was large, recurring and growing. Stanza launched in Delhi NCR with 100 beds in 2017, on the bet that if someone standardised the product the way branded hotel chains had standardised budget stays, tenants would pay a premium for the certainty.

The struggle years

The clearest test of that bet came in the financial year ending March 2021. Stanza’s operating revenue fell by roughly 44%, from about Rs 71.3 crore in FY20 to Rs 39.76 crore in FY21, as the COVID-19 lockdowns emptied campuses and offices and sent students and young professionals back to their hometowns; rental accommodation revenue specifically shrank from Rs 43.14 crore to Rs 28.54 crore over the same period. The company’s net loss for that year came in at Rs 226.33 crore. For a business whose entire model depends on occupied beds under long-term lease commitments, a pandemic that made occupancy briefly illegal was closer to an existential threat than a bad quarter.

The years immediately after were not a clean recovery either. Revenue from operations jumped roughly 2.9 times to Rs 115.08 crore in FY22, but the net loss actually widened, rising 1.8 times to Rs 417.4 crore, as the company kept spending on leases, staff and marketing to rebuild scale faster than revenue could catch up. FY23 saw revenue climb again, to Rs 442 crore, but the loss widened further still, to Rs 495 crore, with total expenses of Rs 953 crore against that revenue — meaning the company was still spending roughly Rs 2.16 for every rupee of operating revenue it earned that year, an improvement on FY22’s Rs 4.97 but still deeply loss-making.

A third, quieter setback arrived after the business had ostensibly stabilised. Having reported a 45% cut in losses in FY24 and a headline return to profit in FY25, Stanza went back to its investors in October 2025 for a further Rs 282.76 crore (~$32 million) led by Accel, with Motilal Oswal joining as a new backer — and the round priced the company at Rs 2,812 crore, about 28% below the Rs 3,900 crore mark it had commanded in a May 2024 bridge round. A company that had just told the world it was profitable still needed fresh capital, and its own backers valued it lower than they had 17 months earlier.

The turning point

The single event that shaped everything after it was a decision Stanza made just as the pandemic was breaking. In early 2020, before lockdowns were announced, the company launched a dedicated working-professionals vertical — moving beyond its original student-only focus into cities such as Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune and Coimbatore, backed by a stated Rs 150 crore of investment and an initial target of 10,000 beds. Weeks later, COVID-19 lockdowns hit both halves of that customer base at once: students left campuses and young professionals went home to work remotely, and FY21 operating revenue nearly halved to Rs 39.76 crore from Rs 71.3 crore, with the year’s net loss reaching Rs 226.33 crore.

Had Stanza remained a single-segment, student-only business, the pandemic would have hit an even narrower revenue base with no working-professional demand to fall back on once offices began reopening. Instead, the diversification that looked reckless in March 2020 became the base the company rebuilt on: operating revenue climbed to Rs 115 crore in FY22, to Rs 442 crore in FY23, to Rs 584 crore in FY24, before easing slightly to Rs 545.5 crore in FY25 as the company reportedly traded some growth for tighter cost control. The bet made right before the crash is the reason there was a business left to rebuild after it.

The money behind it

Stanza Living has raised more than $230 million across eleven-plus rounds of equity and debt through 2024, according to startup-data tracker Tracxn, before adding a further Rs 282.76 crore (~$32 million) in the Accel-led round announced in October 2025 — taking lifetime funding to roughly $260 million or more. Three backers have shaped the company at different stages. Sequoia Capital India, now renamed Peak XV Partners, backed Stanza from its September 2018 Series A, lending early institutional credibility to a founder-led bet on an unglamorous, low-margin sector. Falcon Edge Capital, which rebranded as Alpha Wave Global, invested from a 2019 round onward and became the company’s single largest shareholder, reportedly holding around 26.6% of the register by 2024, repeatedly stepping in with bridge capital — including a Rs 110 crore (~$13 million) round in May 2024 — that kept the company funded through its slowest years. Accel, a backer since the early rounds alongside Matrix Partners India, led the October 2025 round that reset the company’s valuation downward but extended its runway, with new investor Motilal Oswal Financial Services joining as a growth-stage backer rather than the venture-style names that had funded it before.

On valuation, sources disagree, which is itself telling. Entrackr, citing the terms of the October 2025 Accel-Motilal Oswal round, put the post-money figure at Rs 2,812 crore (~$320 million), a 28% fall from the Rs 3,900 crore reached in the May 2024 Alpha Wave round. Separately, startup-data platform Tracxn’s tracking (as referenced by aggregator Growjo) pegs the company’s valuation at around $443 million as of the same October 2025 raise. The two estimates do not agree on the exact dollar figure, but they agree on the direction: down from the company’s 2024 peak, not up toward the $1 billion mark sometimes floated informally around fast-scaling Indian consumer startups — this reporting found no verifiable news report of Stanza Living being in talks for a $1 billion valuation.

How it makes money

Stanza’s core model is a lease-and-manage arrangement, not a marketplace. It signs long-term contracts with property owners and developers — typically structured as fixed leases, revenue-share arrangements or management contracts running five to twelve years — and converts those buildings into Stanza-branded residences. Money comes in almost entirely from residents: a monthly all-in fee per bed that bundles rent with meals, housekeeping, laundry, Wi-Fi and security, with some further revenue from upgraded meal plans and premium service add-ons. Money goes out on rent or revenue-share payments to property owners, employee costs for on-ground operations and community staff, and — because Stanza carries multi-year lease obligations as liabilities — significant depreciation and finance charges tied to those leases: Rs 218 crore of depreciation and Rs 187 crore of finance costs in FY23 alone, falling to Rs 215 crore and Rs 128 crore respectively by FY25 as the balance sheet was managed down.

The part outsiders tend to get wrong is treating Stanza as an “asset-light” tech platform akin to a room-booking marketplace. It is not: because it commits to long leases regardless of how full its beds are, its cost base behaves like a hotel operator’s — largely fixed in the short run — while its revenue is exposed to demand shocks exactly like a hotel’s occupancy is. That mismatch is precisely what turned a pandemic into a near-death event rather than a manageable dip, and it is why the company’s own reported EBITDA margin, while it has improved sharply from -148% in FY22 to -19.7% in FY23 and to a reported 35.66% in FY25, still needs to be read alongside the quality of that FY25 number, given how much of the year’s total income came from the unexplained “other income” line rather than the underlying lease-and-service business.

The numbers

Figures below are revenue from operations and net profit/loss, in Rs crore, as reported in the company’s financial filings and covered by Entrackr.

Two things stand out from that run of numbers. First, revenue growth was never linear — FY25’s operating revenue actually fell 6.6% from FY24’s, even as the headline profit and loss line flipped positive. Second, the losses did not shrink in a straight line either: they got worse from FY22 to FY23 before improving, which is consistent with a company still investing in scale (new leases, new cities) faster than that scale was paying for itself.

Where the money comes from

Stanza does not publish a clean revenue split by customer segment or city, so the more reliable read is by cost and geography. Geographically, the company’s bed network has grown from 100 beds in Delhi NCR in 2017 to over 75,000 beds across roughly 24 cities by the October 2025 funding round, spanning both large metros (Delhi-NCR, Bengaluru, Pune, Hyderabad) and smaller education and IT hubs. By customer type, the business has run two verticals since the working-professionals push of early 2020: student accommodation, its original and still core business, and managed housing for young employed residents, which was meant to diversify demand away from the academic calendar’s seasonality.

The surprise in the numbers is on the cost side, not the revenue side. Employee benefit expenses fell 41% year-on-year to Rs 85 crore in FY25, and total expenses fell 21.5% to Rs 683 crore from Rs 870 crore in FY24 — a far sharper cut than the 6.6% dip in revenue. In other words, FY25’s turnaround was driven less by growth and more by the company shrinking its cost base, alongside that unexplained Rs 277 crore of other income which the underlying filings do not break down further.

The risks

Three risks sit close to the surface of Stanza’s own numbers. The first is earnings quality: the FY25 net profit of Rs 130 crore depended on Rs 277 crore of other income that the company’s filings do not itemise; strip that out and the underlying lease-and-service business was still running at an operating loss on Entrackr’s own reported expense and revenue figures for the year. The second is structural: because Stanza commits to fixed, multi-year leases with property owners while its revenue depends on residents actually occupying beds, any repeat of a demand shock — a future pandemic, a shift to remote work reducing relocation, a slowdown in education-linked migration — would hit the cost side far more slowly than the revenue side, exactly as it did in FY21. The third is investor confidence: a 28% valuation cut in the same year the company claimed its first profit is a signal that its own long-term backers are pricing in caution rather than momentum, which raises the bar for any future round or exit and increases dilution pressure on founders and employee stock.

The takeaway

Stanza Living’s history argues for a distinction that gets collapsed too often in startup coverage: surviving a demand shock is not the same as having fixed the unit economics that made the business vulnerable to it in the first place. The company lived through a 44% revenue collapse, rebuilt to nearly Rs 600 crore of revenue within three years, and still needed a down round the same year it announced profitability — because the profit itself leaned on an income line nobody outside the company can fully explain. The lesson transfers well beyond co-living: a business built on long fixed commitments and short, volatile customer relationships has to fix its cost structure, not just wait for revenue to recover, or every recovery will look shakier than the headline suggests.

Frequently asked questions

Who founded Stanza Living and when?

Stanza Living was founded in 2017 by Anindya Dutta and Sandeep Dalmia, launching with 100 beds in Delhi NCR before expanding into managed student and professional housing across other Indian cities.

Is Stanza Living profitable?

The company reported a net profit of Rs 130 crore for FY25 (year to March 2025), its first year of positive net income, but that figure was driven substantially by Rs 277 crore of other income that its filings do not itemise, alongside a 6.6% year-on-year decline in operating revenue, as reported by Entrackr.

What is Stanza Living’s latest valuation?

Reports differ. Entrackr, citing the terms of an October 2025 funding round led by Accel and Motilal Oswal, put the valuation at Rs 2,812 crore (~$320 million), down 28% from Rs 3,900 crore in May 2024. A separate estimate tracked by Tracxn/Growjo puts the same-period valuation at around $443 million. This reporting found no verified report of the company being valued at, or in talks for, $1 billion.

How does Stanza Living make money?

It leases or enters revenue-share and management contracts with property owners for five to twelve years, converts those properties into managed, branded residences, and charges residents an all-in monthly fee covering rent, meals, housekeeping, Wi-Fi and security, with some additional revenue from upgraded service packages.

How did COVID-19 affect Stanza Living?

Stanza’s operating revenue fell around 44%, from about Rs 71.3 crore in FY20 to Rs 39.76 crore in FY21, as students and young professionals left cities during lockdowns, and the company’s net loss for FY21 reached Rs 226.33 crore, the most severe setback in its history.

Sources

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

• Entrackr, “Stanza Living posts Rs 442 Cr revenue and Rs 495 Cr loss in FY23,” March 2024
• Entrackr, “Stanza Living turns profitable in FY25 on the back of Rs 277 Cr other income,” Fintrackr, 2025
• Entrackr, “Exclusive: Stanza Living raises $13 Mn led by Alpha Wave,” May 2024
• Entrackr, “Exclusive: Stanza Living to raise $32 Mn from Accel, Motilal Oswal in down round,” October 2025
• Entrackr, “Stanza Living reports Rs 226 Cr loss in FY21, revenue shrinks by 44%,” March 2022
• Inc42, “Stanza Living’s FY22 Loss Surges 1.8X To INR 417.4 Cr, Operating Revenue Up 2.9X,” 2023
• Entrackr, “Stanza Living spends Rs 572 Cr to earn Rs 115 Cr in FY22,” February 2023
• YourStory, “Pivot and Persist: Anindya Dutta of Stanza Living explains how the startup has expanded its services during COVID-19,” June 2020
• Business Standard/PTI, “Stanza Living to invest Rs 400 cr in 2 yrs on expansion of co-living business,” May 2020
• Wikipedia, “Stanza Living,” accessed September 2026
• Tracxn, “Stanza Living — Company Profile, Team, Funding, Competitors & Financials,” accessed September 2026
• Growjo, “Stanza Living: Revenue, Competitors, Alternatives,” accessed September 2026

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