Startup Deep Dive : University Living — profitable, but by less than half a percent margin

In July 2024, a Noida-based startup with a few hundred employees bought 51 percent of a UK lettings platform and, in one move, added more than 10,000 beds, 500,000 students and 1,000 landlords and letting agents to its books. The same company, University Living, had by then routed well over $500 million in gross student-accommodation bookings through its marketplace since two former flatmates started it in 2015 — yet on the roughly ₹55 crore (~$5.7 million) of revenue it reported for FY2023-24, its net profit came to well under ₹1 crore.

Founder Saurabh Arora’s insight for the business came from his own semester abroad in the UK, where he found that only one in six exchange students could secure a university-run room, leaving the rest to a private-rental market with no verification and no recourse. Eleven years later, that gap between demand and trustworthy supply is still the entire business model — and, as the numbers further down show, it is also the reason margins stay wafer-thin even as bookings scale.

Quick facts

What they do

University Living runs a managed marketplace that lets international students discover, compare and book verified accommodation near their university before they ever land in the country — purpose-built student accommodation (PBSA), private apartments and homestays, listed across more than 640 cities and 120-plus countries. It does not own any of the properties it lists; it partners with PBSA operators, landlords and letting agents, verifies the listings, and layers on services students actually need once the room is booked, from visa and insurance guidance to bank-account setup, forex and education-loan referrals. The customer is the student, but the paying customer is the accommodation partner on the other side of the booking.

The origin

Saurabh Arora and Mayank Maheshwari were flatmates in Delhi for seven years before they were co-founders. Arora had spent about four years in a banking career; Maheshwari’s background was in research and consulting. The idea did not come from a whiteboard — it came from Arora’s own exchange semester in the UK, where he ran into a number that stuck with him: only one in six exchange students could get a university-allotted room. The other five were left to cold-call landlords from another country, sight unseen, with no way to verify a listing or a lease before wiring a deposit. Arora and Maheshwari started University Living from a small office in India in January 2015, betting that if someone verified the listings and stood behind the booking, students would pay for that trust — through the landlord’s commission, not their own pocket.

The struggle years

The company ran on the founders’ own money for its first three years. Public trackers describe an initial outlay in the tens of lakhs from Arora’s and Maheshwari’s personal savings, with no institutional cheque until 2018, when the company closed its first outside round — an undisclosed early round backed by Indian Angel Network, Manipal Group’s investment arm LVX, Hero Enterprise’s Sunil Munjal, Nitin Singhal, Bikky Khosla and Ishan Singh. Three years of building landlord relationships one city at a time, with no outside capital and no brand recognition against an unregulated, fragmented private-rental market, is the kind of grind that kills most two-founder marketplaces before they reach a second funding round.

The second shock arrived in 2020. Covid-19 shut borders and pushed universities onto video calls just as University Living’s entire model depended on students physically relocating abroad. According to the company’s own account of its history, 2020 forced a pivot away from the core booking business toward domestic marketing work inside destination countries and a build-out of its B2B counsellor network, just to keep revenue moving while cross-border student travel was frozen. It was not a graceful strategic choice; it was survival mode for a company whose product only works when borders are open.

The turning point

The turning point came once travel reopened and the company had cash and a functioning counsellor network again. In July 2024, University Living acquired a 51% stake in StudentTenant, a UK student-accommodation specialist, in a deal both sides have called an acquihire and neither has priced publicly. Before the deal, University Living was a platform with global reach but a thin foothold in the UK’s fragmented private lettings market outside the big PBSA operators. After it, the combined business added more than 10,000 beds, over 500,000 students and roughly 1,000 landlords and letting agents in northern England alone — Sheffield, York, Durham and Newcastle among them — plus StudentTenant’s founders, Adam Ormesher and Karl McKenzie, running the UK operation with local market knowledge University Living did not have on its own. The stated ambition attached to the deal — 2 to 5% of the UK private accommodation market by 2025, rising to 30% of the Houses of Multiple Occupancy segment by 2030 — is a target, not yet a result, but the before-and-after portfolio numbers are the clearest inflection point in the company’s public record.

The money behind it

• 2015-2018: Bootstrapped on founders’ personal savings — no institutional investor on the cap table for the company’s first three years.
• 2018: First outside round brought in Indian Angel Network, Manipal Group’s LVX, Sunil Munjal (Hero Enterprise), Nitin Singhal, Bikky Khosla and Ishan Singh — capital that also carried validation from an established higher-education-adjacent investor (Manipal) at a stage when the company had no brand recognition.
• 2021 and 2023: Seed-stage backing from Haystack across multiple rounds, coinciding with the company’s push into the US and Canada and its move past $100 million in gross merchandise value (2021), per University Living’s own published timeline.
• Around December 2024: Trifecta Capital is reported by Tracxn to have led a further round that valued the company at roughly ₹217 crore, closing around the same time as the StudentTenant acquisition — funding the inorganic UK push rather than only organic growth.
• Total raised — a genuinely contested number: Tracxn’s own tally puts cumulative funding at about $2.6 million across seven seed and early-stage rounds since 2016; other trackers (Crunchbase- and PitchBook-linked aggregations) put lifetime funding as high as $18 million. University Living does not publish a consolidated figure, and the two estimates cannot both be right — treat any single total-raised number for this company with caution.

How it makes money

• Revenue source: Referral commission paid by accommodation partners — PBSA operators, landlords and letting agents — when a booking completes on the platform. Students are not charged a booking fee.
• Cost base: Verification of listings (including physical inspections under its “UL Verified Properties” programme), a 24/7 multilingual support operation, and a counsellor network that now runs to more than 1,500 people across India and Southeast Asia, per the company.
• Where the margin sits: Between what a partner is willing to pay for a verified, ready-to-book student rather than an unqualified enquiry, and the cost of running verification, support and the counsellor channel that generates the booking in the first place.
• Add-on services: Referral arrangements on visas, insurance, forex, education loans and bank-account setup layer additional commission onto a single student’s journey, beyond the accommodation booking itself.
• The part people get wrong: University Living is routinely described by its scale metric — gross booking value (GBV) or gross merchandise value (GMV), reported at roughly $200 million for FY2023-24 with a projected $350 million for FY2024-25 — which is the value of bookings passing through the platform, not the company’s own revenue. Its actual revenue take is a small single-digit-percentage slice of that headline number.

The numbers

University Living’s disclosed financials are thin, and independently audited multi-year figures are not public. What can be sourced, mostly from MCA-filing analysis and the company’s own statements, is set out below (₹ crore).

• FY2022-23 revenue is reported to have grown 60% year-on-year and FY2021-22 growth is not independently sourced here — figures for years before FY2023-24 are cut rather than estimated, per the company’s own selective disclosure.
• The 446.3% jump in net profit on a tiny base means FY2022-23 profit was close to breakeven — the company crossed into clear profitability only recently, and by a very thin margin.

Where the money comes from

• Geography: Listings and bookings span 640+ cities in 120-plus countries, with the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, Ireland and continental Europe as the core study destinations the company names most often.
• UK concentration via acquisition: The July 2024 StudentTenant deal alone added 10,000-plus beds and roughly 1,000 landlords and letting agents concentrated in northern England (Sheffield, York, Durham, Newcastle) and the Luton/Northampton/Hatfield corridor — a meaningful, geographically specific chunk of inventory added in a single transaction.
• Property type split: Purpose-built student accommodation is the dominant format in the UK and Australia; private apartments and homestays are more common in Canada and continental Europe, per the company’s own market commentary — implying the revenue mix by geography is not uniform even though the commission model is.
• Channel split: University Living cites roughly 15% of bookings as coming through student referrals, alongside its own website/app traffic (reported at 5 million-plus annual users) and a growing B2B counsellor and university-partnership channel (15-plus official university tie-ups named, including UCL, the University of Bristol and the University of Birmingham).
• The surprise: for a platform this global, a large share of incremental scale in FY2024-25 came from one inorganic move in one country (the UK) rather than organic growth spread evenly across its 120-plus-country footprint.

The risks

• Margins are thin even after years of scale. FY2023-24 net margin was 0.46% on ₹55 crore of revenue, per MCA-filing analysis — meaning a small increase in verification, support or counsellor costs, or a cut in partner commission rates, could tip the company back to breakeven or a loss even as booking volumes grow.
• Revenue depends on partner commission, not a captive customer. Because landlords and PBSA operators pay the fee and students do not, University Living is exposed if large accommodation partners renegotiate commission terms, build their own direct-booking channels, or if competing marketplaces undercut on take rate to win partner supply.
• Integration and execution risk from inorganic growth. The StudentTenant stake was structured as an undisclosed-value acquihire rather than a full, priced acquisition, and the market-share targets attached to it (2-5% of the UK market by 2025, 30% of the HMO segment by 2030) are the company’s own stated ambitions rather than audited outcomes — a reminder that the clearest growth event in University Living’s recent history is still a work in progress, not a banked result.

The takeaway

University Living’s story is less about finding a large market than about monetising a very specific point of anxiety: a student, thousands of miles from home, who cannot verify a room before paying for it. That insight was strong enough to carry two bootstrapped founders through three fundless years and a pandemic that shut its entire market overnight. But the same numbers that prove the insight was right — billions of dollars in lifetime bookings, a footprint in 120-plus countries — sit next to a margin so thin that a single bad year could erase it. The lesson generalises beyond student housing: solving a real trust problem can build a marketplace people actually use long before it builds a business that reliably keeps the money it earns.

Frequently asked questions

What does University Living actually sell?

It sells verified access, not property. University Living is a booking marketplace that lets international students find, compare and book purpose-built student accommodation, private apartments or homestays near their university, plus referral services for visas, insurance, banking and forex — earning commission from accommodation partners rather than fees from students.

Who founded University Living, and why?

Saurabh Arora and Mayank Maheshwari, former flatmates in Delhi, founded it in January 2015 after Arora’s own exchange semester abroad showed him that only one in six students could secure a university-run room, leaving the rest to an unverified private-rental market.

Is University Living profitable?

Yes, but narrowly. MCA-filing analysis puts its FY2023-24 net margin at 0.46% on roughly ₹55 crore of revenue — a real profit, but a thin one relative to the scale of bookings the platform handles.

How much has University Living raised and what is it worth?

Reported figures conflict: Tracxn counts about $2.6 million in cumulative funding across seven rounds since 2016, while other aggregators put lifetime funding as high as $18 million; neither figure is confirmed by the company. Its valuation is reported at ₹217 crore as of 31 December 2024, per Tracxn, also unconfirmed by the company.

What was the StudentTenant acquisition, and does University Living plan to go public?

In July 2024, University Living bought a 51% stake in UK-based StudentTenant, adding more than 10,000 beds, 500,000 students and 1,000 landlords and letting agents to its portfolio. The company has said it is targeting a stock market debut by 2030, though it remains privately held today.

Sources

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

• Outlook Business, “University Living Aims To Make Its Market Debut By 2030” (accessed September 2026)
• Business Review Live, “International Student Housing Platform ‘University Living’ Reports 44% YoY Growth in FY 2024-25” (accessed September 2026)
• Business Review Live, “The Future of Student Accommodation: Insights from Saurabh Arora” (accessed September 2026)
• Tofler, “University Living Accommodation Private Limited” — financial summary based on MCA filings, FY2023-24 (accessed September 2026)
• Tracxn, “University Living” company profile — funding, investors and valuation (accessed September 2026)
• CB Insights, “University Living” company and financials profile (accessed September 2026)
• AIM Group, “University Living acquires 51% of StudentTenant” (July 2024)
• The PIE News, “University Living acquires 51% of UK-based StudentTenant” (July 2024)
• CEO Insights India, “University Living: Bestowing One-of-a-Kind Overseas Student Living Experience” (accessed September 2026)
• University Living, official company “About” page and published milestone timeline (accessed September 2026)
• YourStory, profile of University Living’s founding and early funding history (2020; accessed via search, September 2026)

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