Entrepreneurs who got the market right: IndiQube’s rise from bootstrapped startup to a listed player

When we talk about entrepreneurship, we often glorify the glamour: the headlines, the funding rounds, the success stories. But behind most of these stories is a long stretch of struggle, resilience, and discipline.

Few founders embody that journey better than Rishi Das and Meghna Agarwal, Co-founders of IndiQube, a Bengaluru-based workspace solutions company that’s quietly redefined how India thinks about offices.

At TechSparks 2025, YourStory’s flagship startup-tech event, the duo joined Sandeep Singhal, Co-founder and Managing Partner at WestBridge Capital, for a candid fireside chat with Shradha Sharma, Founder and CEO of YourStory. The discussion ranged from topics like building in one of the toughest sectors to the challenges of starting out bootstrapped and eventually ringing the bell at the NSE.

In a world where global co-working giants faltered, IndiQube stood apart: building brick by brick, remaining profitable, and proving that vision, discipline, and investor alignment can create an enduring enterprise.

The struggle

“Our story actually began much earlier,” says Das. “My first venture was a hiring firm called CareerNet, which I started with my brother in 1999. Every two years, we had to move offices because we were outgrowing them. That’s what first made us think about creating flexible office spaces—half for ourselves, half for others.”

There was never a grand business plan; IndiQube grew one space at a time. 

In 2018, WestBridge Capital came on board with a Rs 100 crore investment, a small amount for the fund but a significant vote of confidence for the company. 

But then came COVID-19, a test that brought the entire world, and especially the workspace industry, to its knees. “The entire industry was under a question mark—would people ever return to offices? When, where, how? We crossed that point beautifully. The IPO, I’d say, is another milestone in the journey,” says Das.

Profits and predictability

For Agarwal, going public is part of the journey, not the end. And Singhal agrees.

“When companies are young, there’s lots of volatility; they raise private capital, which is bound by restrictions and exit rights,” explains Singhal. “Once a company passes that phase and becomes profitable and predictable, those are the two Ps: profits and predictability.”

It makes sense to transition from private to public investors, he says. “Interestingly, IndiQube came into that cycle pretty early—in 3 to 4 years when they started the company.” 

WestBridge hasn’t sold a single share of IndiQube after the IPO. The firm believes in the business long-term. The founders and investors are now equal shareholders taking the same risks, he adds.

Agarwal nods. “Profitability has been part of our DNA from day one. We are born with that DNA, being an Agarwal. If you can’t touch that money, that’s not yours. ‘Paper money’ never meant much; we became profitable after seven years of our journey,” she says, adding that this thought process has to come from the beginning. 

Singhal finds this rare. Founders who get three things right usually build enduring companies, he adds: they get the market right, have strong commercial instincts, and love what they do.

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Getting the market right

For Singhal, understanding markets starts with understanding human behaviour. “Look at where people actually spend money—housing, transport, education, mobility, healthcare, groceries. These categories don’t change. The nature of your spend doesn’t change.”

“But understanding the fundamental spends of human beings and businesses and aligning your company to that, that is where not only many entrepreneurs, but also many investors tend not to spend enough time, and they tend to just focus on, you know, they have some hammer and then they are looking for any nail. So, figuring out which nails you want to hit with your hammer is key. In fact, it’s so simple that it often gets overlooked,” says Singhal.

Then, AI is just a layer on top, he adds. 

That’s where opportunity lies, he says: in India’s stickiest problems.

Education, for example, takes up nearly 12% of household spending, and will continue to for decades. Healthcare, infrastructure, housing, these are deep, multi-decade markets. They’re messy, but whoever solves them unlocks tremendous value, he adds. 

He points to IndiQube as an example: They took something broken—office spaces that were clunky and inefficient—and turned it into something beautiful, functional, and scalable. 

“We’ve never seen ourselves as a real-estate company,” Agarwal adds. “We’re in the service business. We treat our clients’ employees as our customers and constantly improve their workspace experience.”

This is an extraordinary time to be an entrepreneur in India, according to Singhal. 

“We’re a nation the size of Europe, North America, and South America combined—in one geography,” he says. “That massive number of people living in a small geography is an unbelievable economic opportunity. And then all of these technologies coming up are going to solve India’s sticky problems—whether it’s AI or it’s something else,” he adds.