When Meghna Agarwal co-founded IndiQube nearly a decade ago, India’s flexible workspace industry was still nascent. Co-working was largely synonymous with freelancers and early-stage startups crammed into shared offices. But the need for scalable, service-rich, and end-to-end managed office spaces was growing fast, particularly in large cities where global capability centres were quickly climbing in numbers.
Today, IndiQube is one of India’s largest managed workspace providers, with over 8.7 million square feet under management across metros and tier-2 cities. Earlier this year, the company listed on the public markets, a milestone that not only validated its business model but also underscored the growth of the flexible workspace industry in India.
For Agarwal, the journey has been as much about her own grit and vision as it has been about adapting to an industry constantly tested by shifting work cultures, global headwinds, and the pandemic. An entrepreneur by accident and not by choice, Agarwal hails from a small town in Rajasthan, where women were expected to marry young and settle down.
“I saw all my cousins getting married at the age of 18,” she recalls, in an interview with FE. “I knew very early that I didn’t want that life. I had to get out of Alwar, and the only way to do that was to work hard and become financially independent.” Her parents, though traditional, were supportive of her ambition to pursue education.
Determined to carve a different path, Agarwal became a company secretary by the time she finished her B.Com and later went on to do an MBA in finance and marketing from IMT Ghaziabad. The year she completed her MBA, the September 11 attacks took place in the US, resulting in a job market collapse.
Agarwal joined the corporate finance team of a company in Delhi, but within a month, her life took a different turn. It was here that she met Rishi Das, who would later become both her husband and business partner. The two shared a common entrepreneurial restlessness, and a month after their marriage in late 2003, they co-founded HirePro Consulting, a recruitment process management firm.“Once I started, I realised I liked building things.”
Both HirePro and Careernet, a talent sourcing business founded by Das and his brother in 1999, thrived in the early 2000s as India’s IT industry boomed. A decade later, which included Agarwal shifting her focus to her father’s manufacturing business for a while, and having two children, the idea for starting IndiQube came around 2014, when HirePro and Careernet were in the process of relocating offices in Bengaluru.
The new office space was bigger than required, so a portion of it was sub-leased to startups and Offshore Development Centres (ODCs), who were also their clients. But these companies soon wanted amenities such as cafeterias, transport, and meeting rooms, which only large offices offered. “Startups started asking if they could use our food court or transport,” she says. “That’s when it struck me that there’s a huge gap for a fully-managed yet flexible office space.”
Agarwal and Das leased their first 150,000 sq ft building, called Alpha, in Bellandur in 2015. “We did it out of total ignorance,” she laughs. “But the building filled up in six months.” The concept of offering flexible, fully serviced offices with a pay-as-you-go model hit a nerve with startups and global capability centres alike.
From that single building, IndiQube has grown to over 120 such spaces across cities, including Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune, Chennai, and tier-2 markets. Its clients range from startups to MNCs and GCCs. “People thought Covid would kill our business,” Agarwal says. “But it did the opposite. Uncertainty made companies want flexibility even more. Today, unpredictability is like a blessing in disguise.”
In 2018, the company raised capital from its sole institutional investor, Westbridge. Earlier this year, IndiQube raised Rs 650 crore in fresh capital and Rs 50 crore through the offer-for-sale route in its initial public offering.
In the April-June quarter, the company reported a 28% year-on-year rise in its revenue to Rs 313 crore, while its adjusted cash earnings before interest and tax, or simply the cash generated from operations, were Rs 52 crore, compared to Rs 28 crore in the year-ago period. Nearly 98% of this revenue was recurring, underscoring a business model built on stability rather than volatility.
When the concept of coworking came, it primarily targeted startups. As the market evolved, there was a growing demand for customised workspaces with flexible terms, which led to the origin of the ‘managed office’ concept between 2017 and 2019. IndiQube’s focus has always been on an enterprise-first strategy, catering to companies with larger office space requirements. While workspace leasing remained its core revenue stream, it expanded the offerings to include value-added services such as interior design and build, facility management, food, transport, and technology solutions.
For Agarwal, the story of building IndiQube as an integrated workspace solutions provider is ultimately about creating possibilities, both for companies that are looking for flexibility and convenience and for individuals, like her, who refused to be confined by circumstances.
