Online classifieds Quikr planning IPO in 2021, says founder Pranay Chulet

The firm has a slew of online businesses covering realty, bookings, jobs search, used-goods buying and selling, and home services

Online classifieds start-up Quikr is preparing for a public market offering in 2021, a top company executive said, joining a list of a select few top Indian internet start-ups that are looking to go public in the coming years. 

PolicyBazaar, Nazara Technologies, Delhivery, and ReNew Power are some of the start-ups in India who are at different stages of preparation for a public float, according their own admissions or media reports. Last month, IRCTC, a travel booking platform and a subsidiary of Indian Railways, filed its prospects with regulators for an IPO. 

“We are preparing for an IPO in the year 2021, and work on financial due diligence should begin next year (2020),” Pranay Chulet, founder and CEO of Quikr, told Business Standard. 

The Bengaluru-based firm, valued at $1.1 billion, has a slew of online businesses covering real estate discover and bookings, jobs search, used-goods buying and selling, and home services. “Real estate, jobs, and auto are major sectors of the economy, where transactions are increasingly moving online. We want financial investors to see us as a platform that touches all these verticals,” Chulet said.

The proposed IPO plans of Quikr, and other internet businesses, denote a coming of age of the start-ups ecosystem. With focus on profitability and unit economics, several Indian tech start-ups are learnt to be readying themselves for a public float where investors value businesses through traditional metrics like price-to-equity and cash flow. Chulet said the “timeline (for an IPO) could vary and the decision to list in India or in the US would be taken in the course of the process”. 

Over the past few years, the company has consolidated and integrated several of its past acquisitions with itself as it works towards achieving profitability on a full-year basis. 

In FY18, Quikr’s (consolidated) operating revenue was 321 per cent higher at Rs 173.5 crore, while losses were 58 per cent lower at Rs 233.3 crore, when compared with the comparable figure in FY16. 

If the public offering goes through as planned, it will mark a liquidation event for its investors including big names like Tiger Global, Matrix Partners, Omidyar Network, Warburg Pincus, and Steadview Capital. 

Some secondary share sale by early investors Matrix, which backed the firm at the start in 2008, Norwest Venture Partners, and Omidyar has already happened, Chulet said.

Quikr is built on-top of several acquisitions, including some high-ticket ones in the realty space. 

In 2016, it bought Commonfloor for an all-stock deal of $200 million, followed by RealtyCompass, a real estate listings platform. This was topped with the acquisition of HDFC RED and HDFC Realty, the listing and brokerage businesses of HDFC, for around $60 million. Today, about 40 per cent of Quikr’s revenue comes from the real estate segment.

Quikr faces tough competition from seasoned vertical-only players like Info Edge-owned 99Acres and Times Group-owned Magicbricks in realty, UrbanClap in home services, and CarDekho in online automobile. In the used goods segments, Naspers-owned OLX is said to be a larger player. 

“Almost 2.5 million unique visitors come to Quikr every month, across our properties, and this shows the strength of the Quikr brand. This positions us uniquely as it gives us the ability to cross-sell across services and grow each business line,” Chulet said.