Inside Dextrus’ Contrarian Bet In India’s Venture Capital-Heavy Workspace Ecosystem

The traditional Indian workplace is being reimagined. Whether it is a year-old startup or a decades-old enterprise, companies now want their offices to be more than just functional spaces. They want them to feel personalised, vibrant, contemporary, and aligned with global office trends.

This is precisely why the demand for flexible workspaces is on the rise. Numbers support this thesis well. The flexible workspace market has grown more than 8.4X in the last decade, with transaction volumes climbing to 18.6 Mn sq ft in 2025 from a mere 2.2 Mn sq ft in 2017. 

But the opportunity is not just about leasing space. Management contracts, where workspace operators manage and run office spaces on behalf of property owners, are also emerging as another way for operators to expand their footprint.

For businesses, this can offer greater flexibility in creating tailor-made workplaces, while for operators, it opens up another route to scale without relying entirely on venture capital to achieve growth. 

Dextrus is a key example.  

Founded in 2018 by Robin Chhabra, the startup operates premium coworking and managed office spaces in Mumbai for startups, enterprises, remote professionals and growing teams looking for ready-to-use workspaces. The company engages with businesses seeking tailor-made workspace solutions, capturing their identity and culture.

Today, Dextrus operates at four key spots in Mumbai: BKC Crescenzo, Lower Parel Peninsula Corporate Park, ONE BKC & Mint in Andheri. Its core proposition and offering span fixed and flexible desks, membership plans, and daily and virtual plans, catering to professionals and teams at varying scales and tenures. 

Against this backdrop, Inc42 spoke with Chhabra to understand how he sees the Indian market adapting to the needs of the flexible workspace. What value proposition does Dextrus bring to a market already dominated by the likes of Awfis, WeWork India, and Indiqube? What does it take to build a sustainable workspace business without chasing scale at any cost? Can a well-thought-out workspace truly add to workforce productivity? 

An engaging chinwag with Chhabra revealed a lot about the changing dynamics of the contemporary workspace in the country and the way enterprises are becoming increasingly selective, if not picky, about how and where they sit.    

Here are the edited excerpts from our tête-à-tête with Chhabra… 

Inc42: What pulled you towards the workspace business? Was it real estate, a user pain point, or a broader view on how work itself is changing?

Robin Chhabra: I’m a trained architect, so the way I look at spaces and cities has always been a little different. What led me to start Dextrus was the glaring infrastructural gap in Indian metros, and the office space was the worst offender. Sterile corporate floors on one side, high-density coworking on the other, almost nothing designed around the person sitting there for ten hours.

Over the years, the office has tremendously evolved. Organisations today want flexibility in tenure, in scale, and in how much operational burden they can carry. This called for design thinking to be applied to offices. We understood this early on, leading to the inception of Dextrus in 2018. 

Inc42: How has your definition of a ‘good workspace’ evolved since you started Dextrus? What are the non-negotiables when designing a new workspace?

Robin Chhabra: A good workspace is one that truly understands the depth of what people need from it. Not just a desk and a table, but the full range of how work actually happens. It has to be designed with a wide lens, built to last, and adaptable enough to evolve with the people using it. The amount of light, building design and grade are some of the other crucial factors that impact design.

Inc42: In a business that sits at the intersection of design, real estate and operations, where do you personally spend most of your thinking time today?

Robin Chhabra: Honestly, most of my thinking today goes into how we can improve our product and service quality, which in turn can expand on what Dextrus can offer to its clients. That’s where enterprise solutions came from. It focusses on creating customised and premium workspaces for companies, designed around their specific operational, branding and employee needs.

We’ve built workspaces for companies like Welspun One, Rabobank, Harvard Business School and others, keeping their requirements at the centre of our design. The intersection of design, real estate and operations is where we live, and enterprise solutions are pushing us deeper into that space. 

Inc42: How different is India’s workspace demand from that of our global counterparts? Where are we structurally unique?

Robin Chhabra: India’s workspace demand is ever increasing into global capability centers and managed office spaces. Globally, it’s a different picture. We are leading the way in creating managed offices in the world, which has not materialised in the West as much. India is seeing true value in office space as a cost on their P&L rather than on their balance sheet.

Inc42: Is Dextrus’ core business model more real estate or services-led?

Robin Chhabra: We are a real estate company, but that is not how I would define ourselves. Dextrus is customer-first, which means service and experience are at the forefront of everything we do. We see ourselves as partners in our clients’ business journey.

Real estate is the foundation, but what we’re actually selling is far more than just office space. We’re selling a managed solution. And once you recognise the product is a capability rather than a lease, a lot of other things become possible.

Inc42: How do you manage your business priorities among long-term enterprise clients and more flexible short-term customers? 

Robin Chhabra: We decided very early on that tailoring the product to a client’s need will be where the market will see value. Long-term enterprise clients want a workspace built around their operations, their brand and their people, which means design autonomy and separate access inside their own footprint, while still drawing on shared infrastructure. 

That’s the flexibility of a managed space with the ownership feel of a private office. We do run short-term and daily offerings, but due to its nature, it requires higher costs to manage and hence is difficult to build durably on that demand. 

Inc42: You did not raise external capital to date. What’s your rationale behind this decision, and does it cap your growth? 

Robin Chhabra: It would, if we were planning to expand the way the industry has. The conventional route is to sign long leases, fund the buildout yourself, and carry that for a decade. And while this works, it ties your growth to the size of your balance sheet. For us, following the same route would mean making every new market a 10-year bet placed on day one. And we all know that real estate is cyclical, which means whatever is soaring today will eventually come down.

We feel that our future at Dextrus lies in the other direction, where the landowner becomes our business partner. In our model, we structure a management contract as a profit share. The developer brings the building and funds the buildout, while we bring the design standard, the brand, the operating system and the team that runs it.

In fact, I would say that bootstrapping qualifies us for growth. We spent eight years running centres, and they had to be profitable at the unit level because there wasn’t anyone to bail us out of a bad decision. In a regular lease, a property owner might expect a 6-7% return. Under our model, they can target 10-12%, which is a 50-70% uplift on the same asset.

Inc42: Why would a developer hand you their asset rather than run it themselves or lease it to a larger operator?

Robin Chhabra: Running it themselves sounds simple until you try. Workspace is an operating business, and it requires design and build, service, hospitality, community and daily problem-solving. Most developers are excellent at building and have no wish to become a hospitality company. The hard part isn’t the fit-out. It’s the two thousand decisions that come after it.

Leasing to a large operator gets them a covenant, but their building becomes indistinguishable from that operator’s building anywhere else in the country, and the upside is capped at the rent.

We offer a third thing, and the yield is what they respond to fastest. We can generate materially more revenue per square foot, on the same floor plate, at comparable density, because the product commands a higher rate. Plus, they participate in that upside rather than receiving a fixed rent, and the asset is worth more when they come to value it.

Inc42: But doesn’t this eventually dilute you? Most of the boutique brand that scales stops being boutique.

Robin Chhabra: That’s the right question, and it’s why the model has to be asset-light rather than leased. The two are connected in a way that isn’t obvious. A leased portfolio forces volume on you. Rent is a fixed obligation, so you need occupancy, which means you take the building that’s available and the client who’ll sign. Scale becomes something that happens to you.

Under a management contract, growth is a choice made one building at a time, and the cost of saying no is close to zero. We are able to look at each asset and its natural advantages, whether that’s location, size or something else, and then think through the programme mix and design to unlock the right revenue potential for the building and, in turn, improve returns.

So asset-light isn’t the threat to the boutique positioning. It’s what protects it.

Boutique is a yield strategy. Fewer, better centres generate more revenue per square foot, longer tenures and lower churn than a larger footprint of ordinary ones. The premium end is where the economics are best. The management contract helps us make every asset unique and ultimately enhance returns for the landlord.

Inc42: What does growth look like for Dextrus over the next three to five years? Also, what are some of the things that you would be most cautious about as you scale?

Robin Chhabra: Growth for us over the next three to five years is about disciplined expansion in micro-markets. We are four centres now, all in Mumbai. Growth means deepening in Mumbai and entering New Delhi and Bangalore, around 15-20 centres in total across the three cities. We intend to be in the right building in each micro-market rather than present in all of them. 

What I am most cautious about as we scale is the geographical and operational complexity of entering new markets. Every market has its own dynamics, and getting that understanding wrong is an expensive mistake. The focus has to stay on identifying the right opportunities, not just the available ones, to keep the essence of the brand intact and deliver the best offices to our clients.

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