Startup Deep Dive : Zolo Stays — a co-living decade that ends in a profit made by selling itself smaller

In FY25, Zolostays — the Bengaluru co-living operator that trades under the consumer brand Zolo — reported its first net profit in a decade: ₹59.5 crore (~$6.2 million), on revenue from operations of ₹342.3 crore (~$35.7 million), as per Entrackr’s review of the company’s FY25 filings, published 17 April 2026. Pull out one line item, though, and the profit evaporates: ₹100.47 crore of it came from a single, one-time gain on the sale of Zolo’s entire student-housing business to Good Host Spaces, agreed just after the financial year closed. Strip that out and the core co-living operation still lost ₹35.2 crore at the operating level in FY25.

That contradiction — a “profitable” year built on selling off a business line, not running one better — sits at the centre of Zolo’s story. This is a company that set out in 2015 to fix India’s broken rental market for students and young professionals, pivoted its own business model within its first year, survived a pandemic that gutted its occupancy, lost a co-founder to a new venture, and is now, by its own account, aiming for a stock-market listing in 2026 with a narrower business than the one it spent ten years building.

Quick facts

What they do

Zolo runs managed, furnished shared housing — co-living, in industry shorthand — for working professionals and, until April 2025, for students placed by colleges and universities. It does not typically own the buildings it operates. Instead it takes properties from landlords or developers, either on lease or under a revenue-sharing arrangement, refits them with furniture, Wi-Fi, housekeeping and community services, and rents beds and rooms to tenants on flexible, month-to-month terms rather than the multi-year leases and lump-sum deposits typical of the Indian rental market. Its customers are concentrated in metro and tier-1 cities — Bengaluru, Chennai, Pune, Hyderabad and the Delhi–NCR belt are the markets the company has most consistently reported operating in — and its target renters are exactly the population that struggles most in India’s informal rental market: single people new to a city, without local references or a guarantor, who would otherwise be negotiating directly with landlords or paying brokers for a paying-guest (PG) room of inconsistent quality.

The origin

The founding insight came from a personal errand, not a business plan. Dr Nikhil Sikri had finished his MBBS at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in 2007, practised as a doctor in Singapore, then returned to India to study management at the Indian School of Business between 2011 and 2012, before working in the corporate sector at Cerner Corporation and Deloitte — where he met Sneha Choudhry, who would become both his life partner and his co-founder. Choudhry had already run two earlier ventures, an AI-in-education startup called AugBrain and an edtech company, Genauth Integrated Solutions, before Zolo. The idea for Zolo itself came when Nikhil helped his sister search for a place to live after she moved to Bengaluru for a job: the only options on offer were paying-guest accommodations and hostels that were, in the founders’ own later telling, sub-par on quality and impossible to evaluate remotely because none of them had any real digital presence. Nikhil, his brother Akhil — both IIT Kharagpur alumni — and Sneha Choudhry incorporated Zolostays in Bengaluru on 3 June 2015, betting that renting could be made as reliable and inspectable online as it should have been offline.

The struggle years

Zolo’s first real correction came almost immediately. The company launched as a listing aggregator, connecting renters to third-party PG and hostel operators rather than running the properties itself. Within roughly six months of launch — and after the platform had already listed close to 20,000 beds — the founders concluded that an aggregator had no control over what a tenant actually experienced once they moved in, and rebuilt the business around two operator-led models instead: a lease model, where Zolo takes on a property directly and keeps the rental upside, and a revenue-sharing model, where it manages a property for an owner in exchange for a cut. At the time of that shift, roughly 70% of revenue came from the leased properties and the rest from the revenue-share side, according to the company’s own account to YourStory in December 2018.

The pandemic did far more damage. Occupancy across Zolo’s portfolio had run as high as 80% between January and July 2020, but collapsed to around 35% once colleges and offices shut and tenants went home, as trade publication SiliconIndia reported in a January 2023 retrospective on the co-living sector. The financial toll shows up directly in the company’s own numbers: revenue from operations for the year ended March 2021 was just ₹41.18 crore, barely above the level of two years earlier, while the net loss for that year ballooned to ₹90 crore — the worst result in Zolo’s disclosed financial history, as reported by Inc42 citing the company’s FY21 regulatory filings.

The company’s leadership also thinned out. In March 2023, co-founder Akhil Sikri stepped back from his operational role to pursue a new venture in fintech, remaining only as a non-executive director; Nikhil Sikri continued on as CEO. Inc42, reporting the departure on 5 October 2023, noted that the move came as Zolo was simultaneously trying to reposition itself as a premium accommodation brand aimed at more senior, higher-paying professionals. Then, in April 2025, the company retreated from an entire business line it had spent years building: it sold its college and university hostel-management operations — the segment run under the Zolo Scholar brand — to Good Host Spaces in a slump sale worth ₹107.8 crore, as Entrackr reported on 11 April 2025, with 90% of the consideration in cash and the remainder in optionally convertible debentures.

The turning point

The event that actually reset Zolo’s trajectory landed in the middle of its worst year. On 6 July 2020 — with occupancy still depressed and the pandemic showing no sign of ending — Zolo closed a $56 million Series C round led by Investcorp and Nexus Venture Partners, with Mirae Asset and Trifecta Capital also participating, as reported by Inc42 and separately by Business Standard the same week. On one side of that raise sat a company that had just posted ₹41.18 crore in revenue and a ₹90 crore loss for the year (Inc42, citing FY21 filings) — a company other investors might reasonably have starved of capital until the pandemic’s shape became clearer. On the other side sat a company that used the round to keep signing new supply through the downturn, publicly targeting roughly 500 new co-living units and discussions on more than 5 million square feet of built-to-suit space with developers, per Inc42’s coverage of the raise. The bet paid off in the numbers that followed: revenue climbed from ₹42.5 crore in FY22 to ₹95.5 crore in FY23, then to ₹204.4 crore in FY24 and ₹342.3 crore in FY25 — roughly an eightfold increase in three years, according to Inc42 and Entrackr’s successive fiscal-year reports. Capital raised at the bottom of the cycle, not a product breakthrough, is what actually reopened Zolo’s growth.

The money behind it

Zolo’s capital history spans a decade and at least six disclosed rounds, though trackers do not fully agree on the running total.

• 2015, Seed: an undisclosed early round including Mumbai Angels, per startup-funding databases (Crunchbase/Inc42).
• 16 January 2017, Series A — $5 million: led by Nexus Venture Partners, per Crunchbase’s funding-round record; Inc42’s own database separately credits InnoVen Capital as a participant in the same round.
• 6 January 2019, Series B — $30 million: led by existing backers Nexus Venture Partners and IDFC Alternatives, with Mirae Asset also investing; the round pushed Zolo’s valuation past $100 million for the first time, as reported by The News Minute in January 2019.
• 4 December 2019, venture debt — $7 million: from Trifecta Capital Advisors, per Inc42’s funding database.
• 6 July 2020, Series C — $56 million: led by Investcorp and Nexus Venture Partners, with Mirae Asset and Trifecta Capital participating, reported by Inc42 and Business Standard.
• April 2025, venture debt — ₹20 crore: raised via non-convertible debentures, per Entrackr’s reporting on the Good Host Spaces transaction.

Total funding raised is reported at $98 million across five priced/debt rounds by Inc42 (as of June 2025), while Entrackr separately put the figure at “over $110 million” and Mint’s 2025 reporting on Nexus’s exit talks cited about $113 million — the gap likely reflects how each tracker treats venture debt and undisclosed tranches, and no single reconciled figure is public. What each lead backer changed is clearer than the exact cheque sizes: Nexus Venture Partners’ Series A backing in 2017 funded the shift from aggregator to operator; the 2019 Series B with IDFC Alternatives and Mirae Asset funded expansion into new cities and pushed the valuation past $100 million; and the pandemic-era Series C from Investcorp kept the company signing new properties when most of the co-living sector was retrenching. By mid-2025, Nexus — Zolo’s oldest institutional backer and its largest external shareholder at a reported 27% stake — was in talks with other VC funds and strategic investors to sell its entire holding after a decade on the cap table, according to Mint’s reporting, which also put Zolo’s valuation at that point at roughly ₹1,500–1,600 crore (~$180 million). Separately, business-intelligence platform Tracxn had valued the company at ₹1,360 crore as of August 2024 — a lower, earlier estimate from a different tracker, not a confirmed round.

How it makes money

Zolo’s revenue model has stayed conceptually simple since its 2015–16 pivot, even as the mix inside it has shifted.

• Money in: monthly rent from tenants on furnished beds and rooms, taken either in full (lease model, where Zolo controls the property directly) or as a management fee/revenue share (where an owner keeps title and Zolo runs operations) — the 2018 split reported to YourStory was roughly 70% lease-model revenue to 30% revenue-share.
• Costs out: property-related costs are Zolo’s single largest expense line by far — ₹254.9 crore, or 67% of total FY25 expenses, and these costs grew 83.6% year-on-year, outpacing the 67% growth in operating revenue over the same period (Entrackr’s FY25 review). Employee costs were the next-largest line, roughly flat at ₹82.4 crore in FY25 versus FY24 (Entrackr).
• Where the margin sits: in occupancy and lease-cost discipline, not in a technology take rate. Zolo’s own FY25 EBITDA margin was still negative, at -4.12%, and its return on capital employed was -23.23%, according to Entrackr’s filings-based review — improvements on FY24 (-16.75% EBITDA margin, -89.96% ROCE) but still firmly loss-making at the operating level.
• The part people get wrong: that Zolo’s FY25 “profit” of ₹59.53 crore reflects the underlying accommodation business turning a corner. It does not — ₹100.47 crore of that profit came from the one-time gain on selling the student-housing business to Good Host Spaces, without which the year would have shown an operating loss of ₹35.2 crore (Entrackr).

The numbers

Zolo does not publish a standalone public profit-and-loss account; the figures below are drawn from Registrar of Companies filings as reported by Inc42 and Entrackr. All figures in ₹ crore.

• FY22 revenue: ₹42.5 crore, loss of ₹69 crore, largely a pandemic-hangover year (Inc42, October 2023, citing FY22 filings).
• FY23 revenue: ₹95.5 crore, up sharply from FY22, loss held at ₹69 crore (Entrackr, January 2025).
• FY24 revenue: ₹204.4 crore, more than double FY23; loss narrowed 17.4% to roughly ₹57 crore (Entrackr, January 2025).
• FY25 revenue: ₹342.3 crore, up 67% year-on-year; total expenses rose 43.3% to ₹381.1 crore, meaning the core business still spent more than it earned before the exceptional gain (Entrackr, April 2026).
• Cash position: cash and bank balances stood at ₹34 crore at FY24-end and fell to ₹10.19 crore by FY25-end, even in the year the company reported a net profit (Entrackr).

Where the money comes from

Zolo has reported its revenue in two segments for FY24 and FY25, and the split explains why the company chose to sell one of those two segments entirely.

• Accommodation and allied services (working professionals): ₹273 crore in FY25, about 80% of operating revenue, up from ₹99.8 crore in FY24 — Entrackr reported this as 73.6% growth, the company’s clear growth engine.
• College/university management and food services (the Zolo Scholar student-housing business): ₹62.9 crore in FY25, down 30.7% year-on-year, a segment already shrinking in the same set of accounts that recorded its sale (Entrackr, April 2026).
• By geography: Zolo’s own materials and press coverage describe its footprint as concentrated in South Indian metros — Bengaluru, Chennai and Hyderabad were specifically named as the markets management was targeting for deeper penetration around its 2026 IPO preparation, per reporting referencing Deccan Herald — alongside a longer-standing presence in Pune and the Delhi–NCR region; the company has not published an audited city-by-city revenue split.
• The surprise: the segment Zolo cut loose in April 2025 was not the smaller or newer one. Student housing had been reported at roughly ₹90 crore of revenue the prior year — not far off the size of the working-professional business just two fiscal years earlier — before it was sold for ₹107.8 crore, a valuation that looks conservative next to the segment’s own recent revenue run-rate, suggesting the divestment was driven more by a desire to simplify the story ahead of a public listing than by the unit’s standalone profitability or lack of it, neither of which Zolo has disclosed separately.

The risks

• Ten years in, still not operating-profitable: even after revenue compounded roughly eightfold between FY22 and FY25, Zolo’s core accommodation business ran an operating loss of ₹35.2 crore in FY25 and an EBITDA margin of -4.12% (Entrackr) — the FY25 net profit exists only because of a one-time asset sale, a distinction that matters directly for any investor trying to price the business ahead of a stated CY2026 IPO target.
• An anchor investor heading for the exit: Nexus Venture Partners, Zolo’s first institutional backer and largest external shareholder at a reported 27% stake, was in talks in 2025 to sell its entire holding after ten years on the register, according to Mint’s reporting — an early-round investor stepping away just as the company positions itself for public markets is, at minimum, a signal worth weighing alongside the company’s own growth narrative.
• A narrower, more concentrated business heading into a listing push: by selling its entire student-housing segment — roughly ₹63–90 crore of annual revenue in its final two reported years — Zolo now depends on one segment, working-professional co-living, that itself runs on leased and revenue-shared real estate exposed to sharp occupancy swings, as shown in 2020 when portfolio occupancy fell from around 80% to around 35% within months (SiliconIndia).
• A competitor already ahead on profitability: rival operator Stanza Living, running more than 50,000 beds across roughly 450 residences in 15 cities, reported net profitability for FY2025, according to a July 2026 Mordor Intelligence industry report — in a co-living market Mordor pegs at $0.66 billion in 2026, growing at a 24.34% compound annual rate to $1.96 billion by 2031, meaning Zolo is trying to reach the public markets from behind at least one direct peer on the metric that matters most to public investors.

The takeaway

Zolo’s decade is really three different companies wearing the same brand: a listing aggregator that lasted about six months, a leased-and-revenue-shared property operator that grew through a pandemic on capital raised at the worst possible-looking moment, and now a narrower, single-segment business being groomed for a stock listing by cutting away the very line it built to serve the other half of its original customer base — students. None of those transitions were forced by a single catastrophic failure; each was a deliberate narrowing in response to a business that would not hold together as originally designed. The transferable lesson is not about co-living specifically. It is that a headline profit figure is only as informative as the footnote explaining where it came from, and that a company preparing to answer to public shareholders will often choose to be smaller and explicable over being larger and difficult to underwrite — which is precisely the trade Zolo made in April 2025, one year before the listing it says it wants.

Frequently asked questions

What does Zolostays (Zolo) do?

Zolo is a Bengaluru-based managed co-living operator. It leases or manages residential properties from landlords and developers, furnishes and services them, and rents furnished beds and rooms mainly to working professionals in Indian metro cities on flexible, month-to-month terms. Until April 2025 it also managed hostel accommodation for colleges and universities under the Zolo Scholar brand.

Who founded Zolostays and when?

Zolostays Property Solutions Private Limited was incorporated in Bengaluru on 3 June 2015 by Dr Nikhil Sikri, his brother Akhil Sikri and Sneha Choudhry. Nikhil, a doctor by training who later studied at the Indian School of Business, and Akhil are IIT Kharagpur alumni; Choudhry had previously co-founded two other ventures, AugBrain and Genauth Integrated Solutions, before Zolo.

How much funding has Zolostays raised, and what is it worth?

Total funding is reported at $98 million across five rounds by Inc42, and at over $110–113 million including venture debt by Entrackr and Mint — the trackers do not fully agree. Valuation is similarly unsettled between sources: Tracxn put it at ₹1,360 crore as of August 2024, while Mint’s 2025 reporting on investor Nexus Venture Partners’ exit talks cited a figure of roughly ₹1,500–1,600 crore (~$180 million). Neither figure has been confirmed by the company.

Is Zolostays profitable?

Only on paper, and only in FY25. The company reported a net profit of ₹59.53 crore for the year ended March 2025, but ₹100.47 crore of that came from the one-time sale of its student-housing business to Good Host Spaces. Excluding that gain, the core accommodation business posted an operating loss of ₹35.2 crore in FY25, per Entrackr’s review of the filings.

Why did Zolostays sell its student-housing business?

In April 2025, Zolo sold its college and university hostel-management operations to Good Host Spaces for ₹107.8 crore in a slump sale, saying the move would let it focus on its core working-professional accommodation business and strengthen its balance sheet, according to Entrackr’s reporting. The segment being sold had generated roughly ₹63–90 crore of revenue in its final two reported years and was already shrinking before the sale.

Sources

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

• Entrackr, “ZoloStays reports Rs 342 Cr revenue in FY25; margins improve,” 17 April 2026
• Entrackr, “Zolostays hits Rs 200 Cr revenue in FY24, trims losses,” 22 January 2025
• Entrackr, “Exclusive: Zolostays sells college accommodation biz to Good Host Spaces for Rs 108 Cr,” 11 April 2025
• Inc42, “Akhil Sikri Steps Down As Zolostays Cofounder To Launch New Venture,” 5 October 2023
• Inc42, “Zolostays Bags $56 Mn From Investcorp, Nexus For Coliving Expansion,” July 2020
• Inc42, “ZoloStays — Funding, Revenue & Investors” company database, accessed September 2026
• Business Standard, “Zolostays raises $56 mn from Investcorp and others, eyes expansion,” July 2020
• The News Minute, “ZoloStays raises $30 million in Series B funding led by Nexus Venture Partners,” January 2019
• Mint, reporting on Nexus Venture Partners’ exit talks and Zolostays’ valuation, 2025 (via aggregated syndication)
• SiliconIndia, “Co-living network Zolostays intends with more than double investment by year-end,” 17 January 2023
• YourStory, “How Zolostays is using customer experience to create its ecosystem,” December 2018 (via search-indexed excerpt)
• YourStory, profile of co-founder Sneha Choudhry and Zolostays’ founding story, March 2020 (via search-indexed excerpt)
• Tracxn, “Zolo — Company Profile, Team, Funding, Competitors & Financials,” accessed September 2026
• Mordor Intelligence, “India Co-Living Market” industry report, updated 1 July 2026
• Instafinancials / TheCompanyCheck, Zolostays Property Solutions Private Limited corporate-filing profile (incorporation date, capital), accessed September 2026
• Revelio Labs, Zolostays Property Solutions employee headcount data, accessed September 2026

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