Empty Nest: Why the funding birds abandoned NestAway

 “All of us were busy chasing growth,” reckons a former senior NestAway executive on the condition of anonymity, who has been with the company since 2015 and exited last year. The piling up losses should have made the cofounders and stakeholders press the panic button. “It didn’t happen. We wanted to grow, and cutting expenses was not the right strategy,” he says, adding that the startup hit a valuation of $220 million in 2019. “Everybody had losses. We were not exceptional,” he adds.

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But there was something not quite right about NestAway. One of the backers, on the condition of anonymity, points out that 2019 was the year when the fault lines in NestAway got exposed. In July, Deepak Dhar--one of the four cofounders who had a 10% stake--quit. Three months later, Smruti Parida, another cofounder with a similar stake, exited. If investors sell their stake in secondary transactions, points out the VC, then there is something to think about. “But when cofounders exit in such a short span of time, it’s a sign of something terrible,” he adds. Early in 2019, another cofounder--Jitendra Jagadev—stepped out of NestAway and started taking care of its subsidiary HelloWorld.

While the official reasons for cofounder exits are always sugar-coated, the unofficial reasons are the familiar ones. In NestAway’s case, while there was no cofounders’ conflict and the exits were amicable, the trigger was absence of consensus regarding the role and way senior management was hired and allowed to function. An obsession to get ‘experienced’ hands from ‘big’ names led to a bloated employee benefit cost sheet, which turned out to be the biggest item on the expense book for years.

 In FY18, the employee cost stood at Rs93.49 crore, a 2.1X leap from the previous fiscal. “Many of the senior management were drawing salaries of over a crore,” says another former executive at NestAway. “Even during the pandemic, most of them didn’t have a salary cut,” he contends. While the employee cost dipped in FY19, the numbers again increased in FY21 and FY22. (see box) “Don’t you find this weird,” he asks. In fact in FY22, the revenue from operations (Rs 57.87 crore) was lower than employee cost of Rs69.46 crore!

There was another problem for NestAway, and this had nothing to do with the way company was run. The pandemic dealt a cruel blow, and it aggravated the woes. Revenue dipped, operations were shrunk to tame the losses, and it was hard to find new backers. The existing backers declined to pump in more money. A VC with a home-grown fund explains why having big, marquee foreign names on the board means nothing during a crisis. “They never invest a substantial amount,” says the VC requesting not to be named. “If the bet pays off, they are happy, but if the tide turns, they prefer to write-off,” he says.

With absence of backers, and a diminishing runway, NestAway just had one option: to look for buyers. The process started last August. And there were three in the fray. “Gruhas and Anarock were the first two to come up with offers,” says one of the VCs of NestAway. “Aurum Proptech was the third suitor,” he adds. While the VCs were keen to strike a deal with Aurum given its track record--it had bought HelloWorld from NestAway for Rs 42 crore in 2022--the management was inclined to go with the other suitors. “The deadlock remained for over nine months,” says the VC. Finally early June, Aurum bought NestAway for Rs 90 crore. A startup which raised around $110 million and was valued at $220 million finally gets sold at a 95 percent haircut.

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 Industry analysts and observers are not surprised. “They had a brilliant start but somewhere down the line they lost their focus,” reckons Anil Joshi, founder of Unicorn India Ventures. Much like any other real estate segment, home rental and co-living are an operationally heavy, extensive and draining businesses. While being too slow can take you out of equation, being too fast can kill you. A startup which was present in just a handful of cities till February 2019 spreads itself hyper thin over the next twelve months. In one of the media interviews, cofounder Sahu reportedly said that NestAway nursed an ambition to be “India’s answer to Airbnb." “One has to be realistically ambitious,” says Joshi, adding that the team at NestAway slipped on execution. “It’s a cruel business where you have to keep optimising cost,” he reckons. The business model, he underlines, made sense. “The segment had massive headroom for growth."

Ashish Deora, founder of Aurum Proptech, too reckons that NestAway was well placed in a booming segment, which just had to survive the pandemic. “The startup and the business both are promising,” says Deora, the new owner of NestAway. Shared rental and co-living, he reckons, are the future. “All one needs is to run the business in a sustainable manner,” he says. “We will turnaround NestAway,” he claims. Well, the task won’t be easy, and till that happen, the empty nest of NestAway will keep haunting all founders who aspire to fly high without getting the basics right.

(Forbes India will update the story once it gets replies from the cofounders)