NestAway's Downward Spiral Continues in Eye-Watering FY22 Results

NestAway, the Indian home rentals startup backed by Tiger Global, has released its full-year results from 2022, revealing two consecutive years of revenue shrinkage in the process. Highlights of the company's report include:

• Total revenue of Rs 83.7 crore ($10.2m), down 36% YoY
• Total losses Rs 94.97 crore ($11.6m), up 44.3% YoY
• EBITDA margin slumps to -65.78% (was -15.09% in FY21)

To put it another way, NestAway spent 3.08 rupees for every 1 rupee it earned last year.

A disaster, in other words, especially for a marketplace that received significantly fewer visits than the biggest names in India, and struggled to outdo direct rivals Stanza Living (1.2M visits) and Zolotays (597.4K visits).

NestAway was founded in 2015 as a technology-based real estate marketing facilitator for rental transactions. The firm has attracted backing from institutional investors including Goldman Sachs, Chiratae Ventures, and Epiq Capital among others in the past eight years, and it has expanded to a network of more than 30,000 properties across 13 cities since its launch.

The pandemic led to an understandable drop in revenues starting in 2020, however, a business model shift in the past 12 months will have certainly raised eyebrows given the modest results since.

NestAway originally operated as a managed accommodation provider, but the firm's decision to pivot into a network of rental properties sourced from property owners has had a major impact on revenues:

Source: NestAway, originally published on entrackr.com

NestAway has raised circa $115M in funding since 2015, including a Series D round worth $20M in 2019.

The firm was founded by Amarendra Sahu, Deepak Dhar, Jitendra Jagadev and Smruti Parida in 2015. Sahu is currently CEO, Jagadev is CEO of NestAway subsidiary HelloWorld, while Dhar and Parida are no longer with the business.