Isthara set to disrupt urban living, smart food court space
Hyderabad: Hyderabad-based Isthara, a co-living, student living and smart food court company with operations spread across eight cities in India, is seeing accelerated growth across all its business verticals. The company plans to reach one lakh bed capacity in co-living & student living, and 1,50,000 seats in smart food courts pan-India in next three years. […]
Updated On - 25 February 2022, 02:22 PM
Hyderabad: Hyderabad-based Isthara, a co-living, student living and smart food court company with operations spread across eight cities in India, is seeing accelerated growth across all its business verticals. The company plans to reach one lakh bed capacity in co-living & student living, and 1,50,000 seats in smart food courts pan-India in next three years.
Besides penetrating into existing markets, the company plans to spread to Noida, Pune, and Mumbai soon and will also expand to tier-2 and tier-3 cities such as Kota and Jaipur.
Krishna Kumar, co-founder, Isthara told Telangana Today, “We started our journey to cater to urban living to meet the needs of millennials and Gen Z. We are catering to working professionals who are looking for branded accommodation. We created 1,000 beds in Hyderabad initially and our co-living facilities have been gradually expanded to NCR and Bengaluru taking the total capacity to 6,000 beds today.”
He added, “We saw similar opportunities in student living segment. Several colleges and universities were upgrading their education infrastructure and we saw scope to upgrade living infrastructure for students. Hostels inside colleges with inadequate facilities and colleges without hostels opened us avenues to tap. We took over hostels and upgraded them with food, hostel, and facilities management besides taking care of maintenance. From 600 beds in 2020 when Covid hit, today we have 22,000 beds in student living, making us India’s largest player in the on-campus student living segment.”
Founded by Gilbert James and Vijayan Krishna Kumar in 2017, Isthara has been expanding its presence in the co-living and student living segments. Through its co-living spaces, it provides fully furnished shared-living accommodation for working professionals and students, with a host of amenities. The company used the Covid crisis for achieving 4X growth, turning the calamity into opportunity, he emphasised.
On the tech front, the company is engaging with its audience through its digital and social media platforms to make the experience seamless. Creating curated communities will be one of the future focus areas for the company. Recently, the company acquired software product engineering firm, ‘Letsmobility’ to enhance tech solutions in the co-living and food-tech verticals.
In September 2021, Isthara raised a fresh round of funding from existing investors JM Financial Private Equity, along with Dubai-based Eagle Proprietary Investments and a few family offices. To meet its growth targets for 2025, talks are in progress with PE firms for a bridge fund.
Smart food courts
Isthara has been reinventing conventional institutional food courts through tech-enabled processes in cafeterias across educational institutions and workplaces. Through these first-of-its-kind smart food courts, the company has been acting as a food-tech partner and vendor aggregator to help educational institutes and corporates to digitise their food courts for more efficient management, he added.
The company has expanded its smart food court presence in the country with the launch of its 40th smart food court at the Technology Research Park of IIT Hyderabad early this month, taking the total tally of the smart food court seats of the company to 10,000 in four cities of India.
The company has 6,000 seats in 28 food courts in education and 4,000 seats in corporates and developer segment. “We are dealing with corporates, developers, and academic institutions. We are transforming their cafeterias into smart food courts. In the next 3 years, the company aims to scale to 1,50,000 seats in the segment catering to over two million people,” Krishna Kumar informed.
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