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For Urban Company, 2025 was a year of bold expansion and tough trade-offs. The year saw the services unicorn foray into consumer durables, go public with a splash, face market scrutiny, and whatnot. Here’s everything that defined Urban Company’s year so far.
The IPO Moment: Urban Company’s public listing was a landmark event for the company. Its shares listed on the bourses at a 56% premium, reflecting strong investor enthusiasm. However, the optimism quickly fizzled out as the stock dropped 25% post-listing, with questions over profitability looming.
The Profitability Question: FY25 marked Urban Company’s first profitable year after nearly a decade of losses. But the gains proved narrow. While Q1 FY26 posted a net profit of INR 6.9 Cr, Q2 FY26 swung to a loss of INR 59.3 Cr, driven by upfront investments to scale new verticals.
The Hardware Bet: The year also saw Urban Company accelerate its push into consumer durables under the Native brand, moving beyond water purifiers and smart locks to explore air conditioners. While Native brought a hefty top line and improved margins, reliance on third-party OEMs and ongoing litigation risks posed challenges.
InstaHelp Future: The company’s instant home services arm also saw strong early traction. However, unit economics, service quality and partner retention remain a work in progress, with the management currently prioritising scale and efficiency over near-term losses.
Expansion & Restraint: Urban Company’s 2025 story was also defined by selective pullbacks and aggressive bets. The unicorn exited Saudi Arabia due to sustained losses, while gig worker shortages in the UAE and Singapore exposed the operational limits of its model. On the flip side, the company also created alternate revenue streams with the launch of micro-renovation vertical Revamp and instant services.
India’s healthtech startups are racing to localise critical technologies, yet most wearables and medical-grade devices still rely on fragmented sensor modules that are costly to integrate, prone to accuracy issues, limit scalability and drain battery life quickly.
Next-Gen Biosensing: Founded in 2022, Sophrosyne Technologies is developing multi-vital biosensing system-on-chip platforms that integrate ECG, PPG, respiration and temperature monitoring into a single, low-power chip. Its upcoming flagship SoC is designed to deliver medical-grade precision and continuous multi-vital tracking in a compact, energy-efficient package tailored for global wearable and digital health OEMs.
AI For Insights: Beyond hardware, Sophrosyne is also developing proprietary AI models for signal processing, deep learning and edge inference to convert raw physiological signals into actionable health insights. This edge-first approach allows real-time processing on the device itself, reducing latency, improving privacy, and enabling more responsive health monitoring.
Riding The Semicon Wave: The startup’s trajectory aligns with the Centre’s broader push to make India a semiconductor hub. As the country targets a $150 Bn semiconductor opportunity by 2030, can Sophrosyne become the quiet chip that powers the “Made in India” revolution?
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