How Flent and Cashfree Payments are rewriting the rules of renting in India

Renting a home in India has always been a test of patience. Weeks of house visits, brokerage fees that sting, bare apartments that need to be furnished from scratch, and a landlord who may or may not pick up the phone when the water heater breaks. For millions of urban professionals, this is simply the price of living in a city they did not grow up in.

Flent, a proptech startup based in Bengaluru, identified these challenges as an area for improvement. The company is dedicated to reshaping the renting experience into a professionally managed, comprehensive service that enhances reliability for tenants while ensuring predictability for homeowners. This commitment is what makes Flent a unique solution in the largely informal renting market.

A new category, not just a new company

Flent began with direct observation, not a product change. Before founding the company, Flent co-founders Mayank Lalwani and Shail Daswani were leasing homes in Bengaluru, furnishing them, and listing them on Airbnb. Their co-founder, Rishabh Agnihotri, had lived in four cities, renting multiple homes and investing significantly in personalising each space. What they noticed was telling: a significant share of their guests were not short-stay tourists. They were professionals who had just moved to the city and were using a well-managed, ready-to-live-in home as a buffer while they figured out where to actually settle. Many kept extending their stays. The frictionless experience kept them from dealing with the traditional rental market for as long as possible.

That pattern became the thesis: the problem with renting in India is not just discovery; it is everything that comes after.

"Renting in India has been built like a transaction, not an experience," Agnihotri says. "Tenants are expected to solve everything themselves. Homeowners are left to manage vacancy, upkeep, and tenant issues on their own. At Flent, we want to irreversibly change how renting works."

Today, Flent operates and manages 200+ homes across 20 pincodes in Bengaluru, with a presence in neighborhoods like HSR Layout, Koramangala, Indiranagar, Whitefield, and Sarjapur Road. Every home is furnished and designed to a Flent standard. Tenants get a move-in-ready apartment. Owners get guaranteed tenant placement within 30 days, or Flent starts paying the rent itself from Day 31. If that sounds like a category creator rather than a typical proptech startup, that is intentional.

The challenge: trust at scale

As Flent's portfolio grew past 150 homes and its waitlist crossed 1,000 residents, the operational complexity behind the product began to surface.

Every rent payment in Flent's model is not a simple two-party transaction. A tenant pays a single amount, but that amount needs to be split correctly: the landlord's rent goes one way, Flent's convenience and furnishing fees go another, and utility or vendor payments may need to be accounted for separately. Doing this manually across dozens of homes was manageable. Across hundreds, it became a serious operational risk.

Reconciliation errors, settlement delays, and the sheer administrative burden of tracking every payment against the right home, tenant, and landlord were threats to the trust Flent had worked hard to build. The company knew its payment infrastructure needed to match the ambition of its product.

The solution: Cashfree Payments as operational backbone

Flent chose to partner with Cashfree Payments, and the fit was specific rather than generic. What Flent needed was not just a payment gateway. It needed a system where a single tenant payment could automatically flow to the right destinations, in the right amounts, without manual intervention.

Cashfree's EasySplit made that possible. Tenants pay through a single payment link, and the platform handles the rest behind the scenes: the landlord's rent is settled directly to their account, Flent's fee is separated and routed accordingly, all within an escrow-linked workflow. No amount sits in Flent's account waiting to be redistributed. No spreadsheet tracks who gets what.

"The tenant experience remains simple: they pay once," Agnihotri says. "But behind the scenes, the amount is automatically split and settled to the correct parties. EasySplit has made the money movement match the product experience: simple on the front end, but structured and reliable in the background."

Cashfree's Instant Settlements added another layer of reliability. Rent payments are processed and settled in real time, which means landlords receive their money promptly, and Flent's operations team is not chasing reconciliation at the end of each month. For a business where landlord trust is a key growth driver, that speed matters. Over 40 Flent landlords and tenants have believed in the model enough to invest in the company's pre-Series A round, collectively contributing approximately Rs 1 crore.

The entire workflow, from collection to settlement, is now largely automated. This has kept Flent fully compliant with rental regulations, since funds do not pool in the company's own accounts.

Results that validate the model

Since integrating with Cashfree Payments, Flent has recorded a 120% increase in GMV, driven largely by the addition of 110 new homes to its network over the past 12 months. The operational headroom created by automated payments and settlements has allowed the team to focus on growth rather than firefighting.

Mumbai and Gurugram are next on the expansion map. Flent is deliberate about this: entering a new market means building enough operational depth to deliver the same Flent standard consistently, not just adding listings.

The long-term vision is larger than a rental product. Flent wants to be the default real estate partner across an urban professional's entire life, from their first rental to their first home purchase. But that ambition runs on something more immediate: every transaction working correctly, every landlord paid on time, every tenant who moves in knowing exactly what they are getting.

That is what Cashfree Payments is making possible. And for a company trying to build a new category from the ground up, reliable infrastructure is not an option. It is the foundation on which everything else is built.