It Took Twelve Years. It Was Worth the Wait.
Square Yards was founded in 2014 by Tanuj Shori and Kanika Gupta with a premise that was unusual in the Indian proptech landscape at the time: that real estate transactions in India were broken not at the consumer marketing level but at the infrastructure level, and that building the right technology stack across the full transaction lifecycle — from property discovery through mortgage facilitation to possession and beyond — would create compounding competitive advantages that no single-service competitor could replicate.
That thesis took twelve years to validate at the level the capital markets require. On June 23, 2026, it was validated.
Square Yards announced it had raised ₹900 crore, approximately $95 million, in a mix of debt and equity transactions anchored by EAAA Alternatives and Muzinich & Co, a global corporate credit manager with a substantial institutional footprint. The round crossed a threshold that India's startup ecosystem has been tracking for the company for several years: the $1 billion valuation that officially makes Square Yards a unicorn — the 131st Indian startup to reach that milestone.
The IPO is being prepared. The founders expect to retain more than 50 per cent of the company after it lists, which is an unusually high founder stake for a public offering of the scale being contemplated. And the company is looking to close an additional $50 to 60 million in the next quarter as part of its ongoing capital strategy, suggesting that the current round is a milestone rather than a conclusion.
What Square Yards Has Actually Built — The Full Value Chain
The most important context for understanding this funding round is understanding what Square Yards is not. It is not a property listing website. It is not a broker aggregator. It is not a mortgage comparison tool. Any of those descriptions would be simultaneously accurate about one part of the platform and fundamentally misleading about the whole.
Square Yards has spent twelve years assembling a fully integrated real estate ecosystem that captures value at every stage of the transaction rather than at a single point of it.
The core property transactions business handles primary real estate sales — new construction, developer inventory, direct buyer engagements — with Square Yards acting as the intermediary between developers and end buyers through a technology-enabled brokerage model. This business spans India, the UAE, Australia, and Canada, giving Square Yards an international footprint that most Indian proptech companies have not built.
Urban Money, the group's mortgage marketplace, has become its most significant growth engine and one of the most impressive lending facilitation platforms in Indian fintech. In FY26, Urban Money facilitated loan disbursals worth ₹87,831 crore through a network of agents and partnerships with more than 150 banks and NBFCs. That number is worth pausing on. Eighty-seven thousand crore rupees in mortgage disbursals, flowing through a technology platform that Square Yards built as an internal business unit. The total home loan market in India is measured in single-digit tens of lakh crore annually. Urban Money's facilitated volume represents a meaningful and growing share of that.
Azuro, the group's rentals and property management platform, serves the post-transaction dimension of real estate — the property owners and tenants who need management, maintenance, and administration services after the sale or lease is complete. This is the stickiest part of the value chain: an owner who uses Azuro for property management has an ongoing relationship with Square Yards that extends for the life of the property rather than ending at the transaction close.
Interior Company, the group's home interiors and modular furnishing brand, captures the renovation and design spend that follows almost every property purchase — a category that buyers typically address immediately after taking possession and that has historically been served by an extremely fragmented and largely unorganised supplier landscape.
PropVR rounds out the technology layer with an AI-powered platform for three-dimensional, virtual, and augmented reality property experiences — the infrastructure that allows property buyers to experience a development before it is built, removing one of the most significant information asymmetries in the off-plan property market.
The data intelligence tools that Square Yards has built for property valuation and title search serve both the internal brokerage business and the mortgage facilitation business simultaneously, creating a shared knowledge infrastructure that improves with every transaction the platform processes.
The Financial Case — Why This Is Not a Typical Unicorn Story
The financial trajectory that Square Yards is presenting alongside the ₹900 crore raise is the element of this story that most distinguishes it from the standard Indian startup unicorn narrative.
FY26 revenue: ₹2,086 crore, a 48 per cent increase year-on-year from ₹1,409.9 crore in FY25. The four-year revenue CAGR stands at approximately 51 per cent — consistent compounding across the full period rather than a single spike driven by market conditions or a particular product launch.
EBITDA: ₹176 crore in FY26, compared to approximately ₹47 crore in FY25. That is a 3.7 times increase in EBITDA in a single year, on the back of revenue that itself grew at 48 per cent. EBITDA margin expanded from 3 per cent in FY25 to 8 per cent in FY26 — a meaningful inflection that signals the operating leverage in the platform is beginning to show up in the financial statements rather than being consumed by growth costs.
The context that makes these numbers particularly significant is the funding history. Square Yards' previous equity round was in 2019 — from Bennett Coleman & Co., Genkai Capital, and others at a valuation of approximately $300 million. Then nothing in equity for six years. The company spent six years building profitability, scaling the platform, and growing revenue from a position that did not require external capital validation at every stage. The $35 million raise from South Korea-based Smilegate VC in November 2025 was the re-entry into equity markets, at a valuation of approximately $935 million. Eight months later, the ₹900 crore round crosses $1 billion.
The discipline of that trajectory — building for six years without equity capital, emerging with a platform that generates ₹2,086 crore in revenue and ₹176 crore in EBITDA, then raising at a unicorn valuation — is the opposite of the growth-at-all-costs narrative that characterised the 2021 unicorn vintage.
Tanuj Shori, founder and CEO, has described the company's position with the kind of precision that institutional investors respond to: the platform has been built to be highly profitable, scalable, and fully integrated, and the capital raise provides the strategic firepower to accelerate market expansion.
The IPO — What the Numbers Say It Could Be
The IPO preparation that Square Yards has confirmed is not a distant ambition. It is a near-term plan being structured actively.
Reporting from Inc42 and other sources indicates the company is targeting a ₹2,000 crore IPO, structured as approximately equal parts fresh issue and offer-for-sale. The fresh issue component provides primary capital for growth. The OFS component provides partial liquidity for existing shareholders. Founders are expected to retain more than 50 per cent of the company after listing — an unusual level of founder retention for a public offering of this scale that signals the founders' confidence in the company's long-term trajectory and limits the dilution pressure on the post-IPO governance structure.
The valuation at which Square Yards might list remains to be determined by market conditions and the regulatory process. Sources close to the company have suggested a target IPO valuation of at least $1.5 billion — a step up from the $1 billion-plus unicorn valuation at which the current round is being closed, and a target that the revenue and EBITDA trajectory makes plausible for a platform business with Urban Money's lending facilitation scale.
The timing of the raise within the Indian IPO cycle is deliberate. The second half of 2026 is expected to see a significantly more active IPO market than the first half, which produced only 22 mainboard listings on the NSE and BSE. The ₹900 crore raise positions Square Yards with a strengthened balance sheet, a refreshed cap table that includes institutional names capable of anchoring an IPO book, and a financial track record that has crossed the EBITDA profitability threshold that the most scrutinous Indian institutional investors require before committing to a listing.
What This Unicorn Moment Says About Indian Proptech
Square Yards joining the unicorn club at this specific moment — profitable, growing at 48 per cent, with a mortgage marketplace that facilitated ₹87,831 crore in disbursals — is a signal about where the Indian real estate technology sector has arrived.
NoBroker became India's first proptech unicorn in 2021 by attacking the broker model directly, building a platform that allowed landlords and tenants to transact without intermediary commissions. Square Yards took a different path: not disrupting the broker model but rebuilding it around technology, full-value-chain integration, and the mortgage facilitation capability that turns a property transaction platform into a financial services platform.
The two approaches are not in conflict. They reflect the genuine complexity of India's real estate market — which is large enough and varied enough to support multiple viable business models simultaneously. What the Square Yards unicorn moment confirms is that the full-stack, integrated approach has produced a business that institutional investors will value at a billion dollars and beyond, and that the Indian real estate market's technology transformation is generating companies of genuine scale rather than venture-funded experiments.
Twelve years. ₹2,086 crore in revenue. ₹176 crore in EBITDA. ₹87,831 crore in mortgage facilitations. And now a billion-dollar valuation and an IPO preparation underway.
The patience was the strategy. The platform is the proof. And the public market is the next chapter.
