Why CommonFloor’s $200M exit felt like a loss to co-founder Vikas Malpani

Vikas Malpani thought he would feel like he had won when Quikr bought CommonFloor in 2016. He had spent seven years co-building the startup, which began as a tool for apartment communities and grew into a property portal that reached millions of users. The company had been the focus of his working life. After the acquisition, Malpani missed the structure the company had given him. “I expected to feel like I had won. I felt like something had ended.,” he wrote in a LinkedIn post⁠.

The deal that brought CommonFloor into Quikr

Malpani founded CommonFloor in 2007 with Sumit Jain and Lalit Mangal. In January 2016, Quikr announced it was merging the portal with QuikrHomes, its real estate business. The companies did not disclose the financial terms. Business Standard reported the deal was worth $200 million, while Malpani put the figure at more than $200 million in his LinkedIn post. All three co-founders left CommonFloor about a year after the acquisition. 

The acquisition came as investors were growing wary of startups burning through cash and Indian tech companies were buying smaller rivals to expand their businesses. Quikr struck two deals in 2015 and seven in 2016, according to VCCEdge data. CommonFloor gave it a bigger presence in online property listings, while another purchase that year, Grabhouse, helped it expand into managed rentals. Quikr also bought recruitment portal Hiree and folded it into QuikrJobs. 

Starting over after CommonFloor

In an essay on his website, Malpani said he could have stayed in real estate, become a full-time investor or taken an advisory role. He went back to building companies, co-founding Leher, a social platform for live audio and video. The move took him into a business with very different economics from a property portal. Learning how that business worked, he wrote, came more easily than letting go of the identity he had built around CommonFloor. He also had to question whether the instincts he had developed there still applied. 

Malpani is now co-founder and CEO of Garvik AI, which builds AI tools for businesses. Its ReBillion.ai platform helps employees find information across their company and lets businesses set up AI assistants. Malpani says the company has deployed those tools in banking, manufacturing, education technology and real estate. That last sector brings him back to a market he knows well, this time selling software to businesses after spending years building a portal for people looking for homes.