Strata spent five years assembling more than ₹2,000 crore ($208 million) of pre-leased commercial property for small investors, and in January 2025 it collected the first Small and Medium REIT licence that India’s markets regulator had ever issued. Four months later it handed that licence back.
The surrender, accepted by SEBI on 14 May 2025, came after news reports and a review of legal proceedings against the company’s promoter, and the regulator took the unusual step of warning investors to “exercise caution” in dealing with the entity. This is a deep dive into how a Bengaluru startup turned fractional ownership of offices and warehouses into a large business, and then, at the moment it was meant to graduate into a regulated fund manager, walked away from the permit it had just won.
Quick facts
| Company | Everstrat Property Management Private Limited (formerly Strata Property Management Private Limited), brand name Strata; CIN U70200TN2019PTC127873 |
| Founded | Incorporated 6 March 2019; platform launched 2020. Registered in Chennai, operations run from Bengaluru |
| Founder(s) | Sudarshan Lodha (co-founder and CEO) and Priyanka Rathore (co-founder and COO) |
| Businesses | Online platform for fractional ownership of pre-leased Grade-A commercial real estate (offices, warehouses); briefly a licensed SM REIT manager |
| Assets under management | ₹2,000+ crore across 30+ assets, company-stated as of January 2025 (up from ₹500 crore in January 2022) |
| Latest FY revenue / profit | Private company; audited multi-year figures not reliably public. MCA-linked data shows FY24 operating revenue in the ₹1–100 crore band, reported up about 43% year on year |
| Listed | Private. Its Strata SM REIT registration was granted 13 January 2025 and surrendered 14 May 2025 with no scheme launched |
| Last valuation | Not publicly disclosed. Total equity raised is about $8 million to $9.4 million across seed and Series A |
| Key shareholders | Elevation Capital, Mayfield India, Kotak Investment Advisors, Gruhas Proptech, Sabre Investments; founders hold roughly 38%, funds roughly 51% (per Tracxn) |
What Strata does
Strata lets an individual own a slice of an office tower or a warehouse that would otherwise be out of reach. The platform buys a single pre-leased, Grade-A commercial asset, places it in a special-purpose vehicle, and sells fractions of that vehicle to a pool of investors, historically from a ticket size of about ₹25 lakh. Because the buildings are already tenanted when they are listed, investors are told they earn rent from the first month, alongside any capital appreciation when the asset is later sold. This is the Indian fractional commercial-real-estate platform out of Bengaluru; it should not be confused with the several unrelated firms abroad that also trade as “Strata” in identity software, solar power and residential strata management.
The origin
The founding insight was simple and specific: Grade-A commercial property in India throws off steady rental yields of roughly 8 to 10 percent, but a single asset costs tens or hundreds of crore, so only institutions and the very wealthy could own it. Sudarshan Lodha and Priyanka Rathore set out to break that ticket into pieces small enough for a salaried professional. Lodha came from roughly nine years in real-estate and private-equity law; Rathore had spent about eight years in financial planning, including stints associated with D.E. Shaw and WeWork. The company was incorporated in March 2019 as Strata Property Management Private Limited and the consumer platform went live in 2020, at the same moment the pandemic was freezing the physical property market. The wager was that investors, starved of yield elsewhere, would buy pre-leased rent cheques they could actually see.
The struggle years
The early going was slow and hand-built. The first hundred or so investors came largely by word of mouth, not marketing, and the team was raising money to buy real buildings during a period when the whole country had stopped visiting them. In September 2020, in the middle of the COVID-19 lockdowns, Strata pooled a large sum to acquire three pre-leased warehouses, a bet that logistics would hold up even as offices emptied. Two structural problems shadowed the model from the start, and both would later matter enormously.
- Fractional ownership had no dedicated regulator. Investors were buying into private SPVs, not a listed, supervised security, so protection depended on the platform’s own governance rather than on a market watchdog.
- Liquidity was theoretical. Buying a fraction was easy; selling it before the asset itself was sold was hard, because there was no exchange for these fractions. The promise of an exit stayed unproven for years.
The regulatory limbo ended in 2024, but not gently. When SEBI finally built a framework, every fractional platform had to migrate into it or step outside the perimeter, and that transition is where Strata’s story turns.
The turning point
The single turning-point event is the SM REIT licence, and the numbers sit on either side of a four-month window. In March 2024 SEBI created the Small and Medium REIT category, opening regulated fractional ownership for assets worth as little as ₹50 crore, against ₹500 crore for a full REIT, with a minimum investor ticket of ₹10 lakh. On 13 January 2025 Strata secured a registration under this framework, described in its announcement as the first SM REIT licence SEBI issued, with Strata Capital as investment manager and Axis Trustee as trustee. Lodha said he expected the SM REIT industry to become as significant for India as mutual funds, and set a target of up to six schemes in the 2025-26 financial year. Then, on 14 May 2025, SEBI recorded that Strata SM REIT had surrendered that registration, following news reports and a review of legal proceedings against its promoter, and had launched no scheme and migrated no assets before doing so. The permit that was meant to be the graduation became, within a single quarter, a retreat.
The money behind it
Strata’s own equity funding is modest relative to the property it manages; the company is a thin layer of capital sitting on top of investor-owned assets. The equity rounds:
- Seed, March 2020: about $1.5 million, co-led by Elevation Capital (then SAIF Partners) and Mayfield India, with participation from PropStack angel investors.
- Series A, July 2021: $6 million, co-led by Kotak Investment Advisors, Gruhas Proptech (the proptech fund of Nikhil Kamath and Abhijeet Pai) and Sabre Investments (linked to the DLF promoter family’s Rahul Talwar), with Elevation Capital, Mayfield India and Gemba Capital also participating.
- Total equity raised: about $8 million by the company’s own account, and roughly $9.4 million per data trackers such as CB Insights and Clay. The company’s post-money valuation has not been publicly disclosed.
Separately, and far larger, is the money Strata channels into the buildings themselves, raised from fractional investors per deal rather than as company equity. Two examples show the scale:
- January 2023: ₹76 crore pooled from investors for an office asset in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region at Seawoods Grand Central, spanning about 39,000 sq ft, with a stated gross entry yield of 9.1% and a target IRR of 12.7%, pre-leased for 6.5 years.
- February 2024: the acquisition of Cafe Coffee Day’s 11-storey Bengaluru headquarters, CCD Square, for about ₹150 crore, the company’s seventh asset in the city, taking its Karnataka holdings past ₹410 crore.
How it makes money
The business model is a manager’s model, not a landlord’s. Strata does not keep the buildings; its investors do. The platform earns fees for finding, structuring and running the assets:
- Management fee: an annual property-management fee reported at roughly 0.5% to 1% of the asset value, charged for the life of the holding.
- Performance fee: a share of the profit when an asset is sold, aligning the platform’s upside with the investor’s exit rather than only with fees collected along the way.
- Where the margin sits: because assets are pre-leased before listing, rent flows to investors from month one, and Strata’s own economics scale with AUM and with successful exits rather than with rent it collects for itself.
The part people get wrong is who owns the risk. Buyers often read a fractional stake as a bank-like fixed return; in reality they hold an equity interest in a single illiquid building, exposed to tenant default, vacancy on lease expiry and the difficulty of selling a fraction before the whole asset is sold. The rent is contractual, but it is not guaranteed.
The numbers
Strata is a private company and does not publish audited financials in reliable multi-year detail; ministry-of-corporate-affairs-linked data shows FY24 operating revenue only within a ₹1–100 crore band, reported up about 43% year on year, on a paid-up capital of about ₹25.6 lakh and a headcount near 50. Rather than print an unverified profit-and-loss table, the honest scoreboard for a fractional platform is its traction, the figures below being company-stated at each date:
| Date | Assets under management | Portfolio / investors |
| January 2022 | ₹500 crore (crossed) | Growing office and warehouse portfolio |
| January 2023 | Scaling toward ₹1,000 crore | 50,000+ users; 2,500+ active investors |
| February 2024 | ₹1,500+ crore | ~34 assets; about 3.7 million sq ft |
| January 2025 | ₹2,000+ crore | 3,500+ active investors |
One number matters more than the AUM: the first full exit. In February 2024 Strata sold a Jaipur warehouse it had listed as “Jaipur Opportunity”, acquired at ₹20.09 crore and sold at ₹23.25 crore, a 5.72% CAGR on the asset value and a reported 13% to 14% return to investors over roughly two years. The company called it the first full exit any Indian fractional-ownership platform had delivered; about 45% of the investors in that 88,000 sq ft asset were first-time fractional buyers.
Where the money comes from
The portfolio is weighted toward two asset types and a handful of metros, and toward a base of retail investors rather than institutions.
- Asset mix: pre-leased offices and industrial or warehousing space, the warehouse bet dating to the 2020 logistics acquisition and offices anchored by trophy buildings such as CCD Square.
- Geography: concentrated in Bengaluru, the Mumbai Metropolitan Region and other major metros; Karnataka assets alone exceeded ₹410 crore after the CCD Square deal in February 2024.
- Investor base: 50,000+ registered users but a far smaller core of 2,500 to 3,500 active investors writing cheques, which tells you the funnel from curiosity to commitment is narrow.
The surprise is how little of the ₹2,000 crore headline is Strata’s own money. The company’s balance sheet carries a paid-up capital measured in lakhs and total equity of under $10 million; the crore-scale figures are investor-owned property that Strata manages for a fee. The platform is small; the pool it steers is large.
The risks
- Governance and legal overhang. The reason SEBI cited for accepting the SM REIT surrender was legal proceedings against the promoter. Founder Sudarshan Lodha secured anticipatory bail from the Madras High Court on 22 April 2025, in a matter that included an allegation that a company official impersonated a SEBI officer to obtain information from a builder, Avigna. SEBI publicly advised investors to exercise caution with the entity. For a business whose entire product is trust in a manager, a regulator’s caution notice is close to an existential risk.
- An unfinished project dispute. Reporting on the Avigna Industrial Parks project in Hosur, Tamil Nadu, describes about ₹19.5 crore raised from roughly 60 investors for a mezzanine floor that was, per those reports, never built, original investors facing a nine-month rent loss, a builder’s admitted non-delivery of about ₹11.5 crore, and a disputed ₹2.5 crore loan, with arbitration unresolved. Strata has said the properties remain operational with no disruption to payouts and has neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing; the disputed facts sit in arbitration, not in a settled record.
- Structural illiquidity and single-asset concentration. Each investor owns a fraction of one building, not a diversified fund. If a tenant leaves at lease expiry, the rent stops for that asset, and exiting early depends on finding a private buyer for the fraction. The February 2024 Jaipur exit proved an exit is possible, but a single successful sale is not a liquid market.
The takeaway
The transferable lesson is about the price of a licence. For years, fractional-ownership platforms argued that formal regulation would legitimise the category and unlock institutional-scale demand. Strata won that legitimacy first, and then found it could not carry the weight, because a regulated fund manager is judged not on its product but on the conduct of the people behind it. The licence did not create the governance questions; it exposed them, and the entity that most wanted to be regulated became the one warned about by the regulator. Ambition can outrun the housekeeping that ambition requires, and in finance the housekeeping is the business.
Frequently asked questions
Is Strata the same as the “Strata” companies abroad?
No. This Strata is the Indian fractional commercial-real-estate platform run by Everstrat Property Management Private Limited (formerly Strata Property Management Private Limited), based in Bengaluru. It is unrelated to same-name firms overseas in identity software, solar energy or residential strata management.
What happened to Strata’s SM REIT licence?
SEBI granted Strata an SM REIT registration on 13 January 2025, the first under the new framework. On 14 May 2025 SEBI recorded that Strata SM REIT had surrendered the registration, following news reports and a review of legal proceedings against its promoter, without having launched any scheme, and advised investors to exercise caution.
How does Strata make money?
It charges an annual property-management fee reported at about 0.5% to 1% of asset value, plus a performance fee, a share of the profit, when an asset is sold. Its investors, not Strata, own the buildings.
How much money has Strata raised, and from whom?
About $8 million to $9.4 million in equity: a roughly $1.5 million seed in March 2020 and a $6 million Series A in July 2021. Backers include Elevation Capital, Mayfield India, Kotak Investment Advisors, Gruhas Proptech and Sabre Investments. Separately, it has pooled far larger sums from fractional investors to buy individual buildings.
Did Strata ever return money to investors?
Yes, at least once fully. In February 2024 it sold a Jaipur warehouse acquired at ₹20.09 crore for ₹23.25 crore, delivering a reported 13% to 14% return over about two years, which the company described as the first full exit by an Indian fractional-ownership platform.
Sources
Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).
- Business Today — SEBI: Strata SM REIT surrenders certificate of registration (May 2025)
- Business Standard — SEBI warns investors as Strata exits SM REIT framework post legal row (May 2025)
- The Property Times — Strata secures SEBI licence for SM REIT, aims for up to 6 schemes in FY26 (January 2025)
- The Alt Investor — SEBI warns as Strata surrenders SM REIT licence: what went wrong (2025)
- Entrepreneur India / Venture Intelligence — Strata raises $6M Series A led by Kotak, Gruhas Proptech, Sabre (July 2021)
- CB Insights and Clay — Strata funding profile and total raised
- YourStory / Outlook Business / Entrepreneur — Strata raises Rs 76 crore for its MMR office asset (January 2023)
- Outlook Business / Business Standard — Strata acquires Bengaluru’s CCD Square for about Rs 150 crore (February 2024)
- Business Standard / The Week — Strata becomes first Indian fractional platform to give a full exit, Jaipur asset (February 2024)
- ANI News — Strata crosses Rs 500 crore AUM mark (January 2022)
- StartupTalky — Strata success story, founders, business and revenue model
- Tofler, Tracxn, InstaFinancials — Everstrat / Strata Property Management corporate filings (CIN U70200TN2019PTC127873)
- Strata (strataprop.com) — About Us, company-stated figures
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