Quikr is a dumpster fire

Twelve years since it first opened for business, millions of dollars in funding and several acquisitions later, the company is a mangled mess

Ashish K. Mishra

Mumbai

20 January 2020

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If you follow the news cycle that started earlier this year, you’d almost start believing that things are looking up for Quikr, a company that used to be an online classifieds business.

A unicorn, valued at over $1 billion, Quikr does not get the sort of breathless coverage that other revered Unicorns do. Not because Quikr is loved less. It is only because no sane individual can accurately decipher what exactly Quikr is up to at any given point in time. The company’s strategy can put shifting sands to shame. There are points in time, as it wildly acquired company after company, that this writer thought of Quikr as a chameleon. Only to later regret that a chameleon is intelligent.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

Online classifieds and services portal Quikr narrowed its losses to ₹230.04 crore in the financial year ended March 2019 from ₹237.43 crore loss a year ago. The Bengaluru-based

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