NestAway: a managed-rental startup that sold for 5% of its peak value

Context

Renting a flat in Bengaluru as a single professional has long meant the same problems: brokers who charge a month's rent, owners who refuse bachelors, large deposits, and an empty unfurnished flat on day one. Owners have their own list: vetting tenants, chasing rent, handling repairs from another city, and arguing over damage at move-out.

NestAway, founded in Bengaluru in January 2015 by Amarendra Sahu, Deepak Dhar, Jitendra Jagadev and Smruti Parida, set out to sit in the middle of both lists. Inc42 describes the model as a marketplace that "turns unfurnished houses into fully-furnished and managed apartments and rents them to pre-verified tenants." Tenants paid no brokerage. Owners got a managed tenancy and, per Dazeinfo, damage cover of up to ₹1 crore.

Investors backed it heavily. NestAway raised about $110 million in total, according to Inc42 and Entrackr, from investors including Tiger Global, Goldman Sachs, Ratan Tata's UC-RNT Fund, Flipkart and Yuri Milner. Its last round in 2019 valued it at $220 million. TechCrunch puts the totals slightly higher, at $115 million raised and a $227 million valuation. We use the lower figures below.

Four years later it sold for up to Rs 90 crore, about $11 million at the time.

What they built

NestAway was a two-sided platform with a heavy service layer underneath.

• Supply. Owners listed unfurnished homes. NestAway furnished and managed them for young professionals and students.
• Demand. Tenants searched, booked and paid online, with no broker and a pre-verified profile.
• Operations. Move-in, rent collection, maintenance, move-out inspection and deposit refunds, run through NestAway's own staff and field teams.
• Adjacent bets. It also ran a co-living unit, HelloWorld, which Aurum PropTech bought in 2022, a year before buying the rest of the company.

Forbes India reported that at its peak NestAway had served more than 35,000 tenants and 16,000 owners across Bengaluru, Delhi NCR, Hyderabad, Mumbai and Pune.

The app was the visible part. The business was the operations layer: every rupee of rent and deposit passed through NestAway, and every dispute between owner and tenant became NestAway's problem.

The numbers

Revenue here is revenue from operations, from Registrar of Companies filings as reported by Entrackr, Inc42 and Forbes India.

Points worth reading closely:

• Cost ran ahead of revenue from the start. In FY18 NestAway spent Rs 4.3 to earn each rupee of revenue. Employee costs that year were Rs 93.49 crore, twice the prior year and about double revenue.
• The balance sheet was not the problem early on. In FY18 NestAway held Rs 293.84 crore in mutual funds, per Entrackr. Money was available. The cost structure was what failed to catch up.
• Revenue peaked before the pandemic. Revenue reached Rs 108.9 crore in FY20, then fell 16.7% in FY21 and a further 36.2% in FY22.
• FY22 was structurally unprofitable. Total expenses were Rs 178.4 crore against Rs 57.87 crore of operating revenue. Employee benefits alone were Rs 69.46 crore, more than revenue. NestAway also booked a Rs 25.56 crore impairment on financial assets. It spent Rs 3.08 for each rupee of operating revenue.
• Supply shrank sharply. TechCrunch reported homes on the platform fell from 50,000 before the pandemic to 18,000 at the time of sale. Inc42 put annualised revenue at the sale at Rs 30 crore.

The sale. In June 2023 listed Aurum PropTech approved buying up to 100% of NestAway for up to Rs 90 crore, and committed Rs 30 crore more to stabilise the business. Entrackr and Inc42 put that at roughly a 95% cut to the 2019 valuation.

After the sale. NestAway now runs as part of Aurum PropTech's rentals business. Online Marketplaces reported in January 2026 that NestAway had "circa 10,000 rentable units nationwide," and that Aurum's rentals segment (NestAway plus HelloWorld) earned INR 545 million in the quarter, up 24% year on year. NestAway's revenue is not reported separately.

A co-founder has since contested the sale in court. We found no reported final ruling.

What worked, what broke

What worked.

• The problem was real. No brokerage, furnished homes and verified tenants addressed genuine pain on both sides. Revenue grew nearly 19x from FY16 to FY20.
• Supply acquisition worked. Reaching 50,000 homes means owners trusted a startup with their property. That is hard in Indian real estate.
• The asset had value to a consolidator. Aurum bought HelloWorld first, then NestAway, and still runs both. The platform and brand outlived the cap table.

What broke.

• The service layer never got cheaper per home. A managed rental needs people for inspections, maintenance, collections and disputes. Employee costs exceeded revenue in both FY18 and FY22. Scale added headcount instead of spreading it. Forbes India quotes a former executive: "All of us were busy chasing growth."
• Money flows became trust flows. NestAway held tenant deposits and passed rent to owners. When COVID emptied rentals as tenants went back to their home towns, move-outs spiked. In July 2020 tenants complained publicly about unreturned deposits and unexpected charges; a Change.org petition gathered 204 signatures and some tenants went to consumer court. NestAway said it had cleared over 3,000 pending deposit cases and refunded 95% of tenants who moved out before June, and that deductions reflected third-party damage inspections. Either way, the brand took the hit.
• Opaque status made every delay look like a dispute. A tenant waiting on a deposit, or an owner waiting on rent, could not see where the money was or why. A delay that might have been a backlog read as bad faith.
• No cushion when the cycle turned. With costs above revenue every year, a demand shock turned into a funding question, and in 2020 to 2023 that question had no good answer.

The fair reading: NestAway's idea held up. It failed on the cost of running the service by hand and on how visible, or invisible, money and status were to owners and tenants.

How to apply this at your scale

Few Indian developers or CPs will build a NestAway. But many already run parts of it: rental management for investor-buyers after possession, resale and leasing desks, or maintenance and handover for completed towers. Each involves holding someone's money or keys, and each creates the same trust risk at smaller scale.

The lesson that transfers is simple: when money and status are hidden, every delay becomes a complaint, and every complaint needs a person to handle it. A logged-in portal for owners and tenants (or buyers) makes the status visible and removes much of the manual handling. Practically:

• Show money status in one place. Rent received, owner payout date, deposit held, deductions with photos and reasons, refund date. If an owner can see "payout scheduled for the 5th," they do not call on the 3rd.
• Put the move-out process in writing, on screen. Inspection checklist, photos at move-in and move-out, a deduction line for each item, and a timeline for the refund. Most deposit disputes are about evidence nobody can find.
• Let people raise and track tickets themselves. Maintenance requests with status and expected dates reduce inbound calls and show you where your field team is slow.
• Keep documents with the unit. Rent agreement, police verification, handover checklist and receipts stored against the property, not in someone's inbox.
• Measure cost per unit managed. If your team size grows in line with units, you are repeating NestAway's cost curve. Track tickets per unit and time to resolve, and push repeat questions into the portal.

This does not need to launch as a large product. For a developer handing over one tower to investor-buyers, a simple portal covering payouts, documents and tickets is enough to start. What matters is that owners and tenants can see what you see, before they have to ask.