Urban Company IPO gets off to a strong start; retail portion fully subscribed within an hour

Urban Company’s initial public offering was fully subscribed within hours of opening on Wednesday, making it one of the few recent startup listings to draw strong early demand.

Retail investors led the rush, bidding for more than three times their allotted shares. The retail portion of the IPO was fully subscribed within an hour.

The portions reserved for employees and non-institutional investors were also oversubscribed.

By midday, investors had placed orders for 6 crore shares against 10.7 crore on offer—about 57% of the overall book. The retail tranche was subscribed 3.02 times, the employee portion 2.9 times, and the non-institutional quota 1.29 times. Qualified institutional buyers were slower to act, with just 20% of their reserved shares subscribed.

The Rs 1,900-crore ($229 million) offering, which closes on September 12, is scheduled to list on September 17.

The Gurugram-based home-services marketplace had raised Rs 853.9 crore ($97 million) from anchor investors yesterday (September 9), selling shares at the top of the price band of Rs 98 to Rs 103. Global funds including Goldman Sachs, Dragoneer Investments, Norges Bank, GIC, and Nomura participated in the anchor round, along with 13 domestic mutual funds including SBI, HDFC, ICICI Prudential, Nippon, and UTI.

At the upper end of the price band, the company would be valued around Rs 14,000 crore ($1.5 billion).

The offering includes a fresh issue of Rs 429 crore and an offer-for-sale of Rs 1,471 crore by early investors Accel, Elevation Capital, and Bessemer Venture Partners, who stand to notch multi-bagger returns—up to 28 times on their initial bets.

Urban Company’s revenue rose to Rs 1,144.5 crore in FY25 from Rs 828 crore the previous year, while profit before tax reached Rs 205.6 crore, marking a decisive swing from earlier losses. Adjusted EBITDA turned positive, and at current valuations, the IPO implies a price-to-earnings multiple of roughly 60 times FY25 earnings and a price-to-sales ratio of about 13 times.

The offering comes at a time when India’s IPO market is testing investor appetite for startups and consumer-tech firms.

The listing of Zomato and Nykaa were runaway hits in 2021, with their IPO being subscribed many times over. IdeaForge’s listing in 2023 reflected the strong support for emerging hardware-led firms. More recently, the IPOs of Unicommerce, Awfis, and Ixigo drew triple-digit subscription levels.

On the other hand, Swiggy’s IPO last year was subscribed only three times, while Ola Electric, FirstCry, and MobiKwik received a more muted response amid questions over profitability.