Beyond a co-working space: iSprout

iSprout’ is a space wherein ideas sprout to bud into a startup and further flourish into a successful enterprise. With this thought in mind, a chartered accountant with 15 years of experience, Sundari Patibandla came up with the idea to provide co-working space for startups and foreign companies looking to establish their foothold in Telangana.

As a chartered accountant, Sundari had corporate companies and startups as her clients. She began by processing their registration, licenses and other formalities. As getting a license for clients without an office address was difficult, she used to provide her office address and space.

She further adds, “From last 10 years we have helped nearly two hundred companies to start their operations. They used to be in our office for three months and post recruitments they would find a place to move out. That’s when I got this idea to provide office space for such companies.”

A self funded startup, ‘iSprout’ was established in 2017 by setting up their first co-working space at Kondapur on 12,500 sft with 200 seating capacity. She visited Google, Facebook and T-Hub offices to get a feel about the interiors. Sundari shopped from various countries and collected exclusive designs and quotes to décorate the walls of ‘iSprout’.

With a high capex requirement for business centres, an idea rooted in the minds of Sundari 10 years ago but wasn’t fruitful till 2017. “I was scared to take a bold step 7 years back as the capital investment was huge. By 2017, already five business centres had come up in Hyderabad; otherwise I would have stood as the pioneer of co-working space provider in this city.”

The CEO received initial support and push from her partner for the first centre. Her other three friends joined in for investment of the second centre; one amongst them being Hima Bindu.

A director on board and investor in ‘iSprout’, Hima Bindu had plans of going on a sabbatical from her 17 years of professional life. As she was eager to pursue something more than her usual profession, she found an interesting opportunity at ‘iSprout’. As she puts it, “They say that universe conspires when you badly want to do something, all the elements come together to make it happen.”

Sharing her experience, Hima said, “For six months, we were searching for space as realtors wanted to give out bigger spaces to the known names. When you go down a bit, you know how to bounce back, and that’s how we bounced back with the second largest co-working space in Hyderabad at Hitech.”

With an initial idea to train girl mechanical engineering students and hand-hold startups run by women entrepreneurs, Hima plans to fill the gap of infrastructure in mechanical training and skilling created by flamboyant courses. “Female engineers bring in a lot of stability, so why not we train women mechanical engineers and give them an opening.” Going ahead, she plans to provide guidance women entrepreneurs placed at their co-working space.

‘iSprout’ is launching its third co-working space at Vijayawada this month, which will be the first business centre provider to enter that city. The company, which provides auxiliary services like looping angel investors with startups placed at ‘iSprout’; down the lane, has many more plans to be incorporated in support of startups. As, Sundari concludes, nothing is impossible if there is hard work and determination to work towards a life plan.