Revolutionizing India's Micro-Warehousing Sector with Airattix
Pune: Armed with a Master’s degree from Newcastle University, UK, Aditya Kale entered the Indian market in his mid-30s in 2021, with the strong desire to start something on his own. The intensive study he did to complete his MSc in Operations and Supply Chain Management made him quickly realize wherein lay the opportunity. He noticed a gap in the warehousing market and stepped in to fill it. Micro-warehousing was a poorly-managed sector at the time and he launched his startup, Airattix, to fix that.
India’s urban population has been growing in leaps and bounds. According to World Bank estimates, from 31% in 2011, it is 35% now. At this rate, by 2030, the country will have 40.76% of its people living in cities. As more and more people move to the cities looking for livelihood opportunities, space becomes scarce and a luxury as demand increases. This results in smaller homes with less space to keep one’s belongings. This seemingly trivial problem was going unnoticed, according to Aditya. People either got rid of the things their houses did not have space for or hired spaces to just keep their goods.
Hiring such spaces became a trend during the pandemic when work-from-home became the norm. People returned to their hometowns and needed a place to keep their belongings. Understanding the loopholes, Aditya set about filling these up with easy solutions. First, he understood clearly that he needed to develop an aggregator platform for storage spaces. “This would make it easy for anyone to see what is available and which storage would be most suitable to their needs,” he said. He started with one developer, and after drawing the skeleton, set to work on it. He created a website and started listing only those warehouses that were offering self-storage.
In 2021, when he started, he found 25 such warehouses pan India, with four in Pune. Now people could simply get on his website, airattix.com, and clearly see what spaces were available and where, and select the one that best suited them. He used digital marketing to promote his website, and in the very first month of its launch, it attracted 15 paying customers.
But, when the lockdowns were lifted and people started returning back to cities, Aditya noticed a different trend. Now, customers were more particular about the areas they wanted a warehouse for to keep their household goods. “People now wanted storage spaces near their homes. Meanwhile, I also started getting enquiries from wholesale traders and e-commerce sellers. A small shop selling shoes does not necessarily have the space to keep all the stock. If the size a customer wants is not currently available, he can store it with us nearby and run to get the right size. So I tweaked our model a bit,” said Aditya. “We now started promoting ourselves as a storage platform and asked anyone who had extra space to list it on our platform.”
By 2023, Airattix had established itself as a storage space company primarily for household goods even though small businesses and e-commerce players also used his platform. “About 60% of our customers were householders and 40% businesses,” Aditya said. Having learned to look for opportunities in changing dynamics, he kept his ear to the ground to observe changing patterns in needs and to spot opening doors. Aditya said, “While we had a mix of householders and small businesses as our customers, I noticed the way the railways managed their cloak rooms, where people could store their luggage when they visited any place, particularly in temple towns where people come only to visit the shrine and need some place to keep their luggage. So I thought, why not expand our offering to include luggage as well?”
And, he started doing just that, beginning with Ayodhya and Kathmandu from mid-2025. Airattix developed a technology for luggage storage within 800 metres of Pashupatinath and the Ram temple in Ayodhya. “In towns like Ayodhya, there is not much to do except for darshan. So, people come for darshan and take off,” Aditya said. “We hired a 1,000 sq ft commercial space close to the Ram temple and started offering it on our platform. Now, people no longer had to worry about their suitcases. And, since the temple does not allow any luggage inside, pilgrims can safely keep it with us and go for darshan.”
From storage spaces for people going out or returning to cities to those just wanting to declutter their homes, from small businesses to temple visitors, Aditya kept a keen eye, and still does, on the evolving needs of people. “Redevelopment is now quite widespread in many cities. And people affected need space for their goods. Also, Indian Army personnel posted in border areas need space for their household goods. We now offer our space to a couple of regiments as well,” Aditya said with pride.
According to the entrepreneur, “there is no one in India who offers what they do. Ours is the only micro-warehousing facility in India. And, our billing is an open system. Once you hire our space, the invoice is generated on the app itself.” As of now, Airattix has a million-sq-ft storage space on their app across 20 cities. Adding one more feather to its cap, it has started offering garages as well. “Since many people have more cars than their parking spaces, we have aggregated people who have empty garages that are then offered to those who need it. We look at every possible need that may arise,” said Aditya.
How has digitising his service impacted the micro warehousing business? Aditya said, “Oh, it has been a game changer inasmuch as growth is concerned. Proper customer management software, smooth online check-out, e-generation of invoices can really alter the game.” As of now, Airattix employs 40 people - 30 for sales and administration and 10 in the technological department.
When Airattix started, Aditya invested ₹30 lakh from his own personal savings. Later, he invested ₹3 crore and raised ₹4.5 crore from HNIs (High-Net-Worth Individuals). He explained: “As the startup culture grows, more and more HNIs are driven towards it. VCs (Venture Capitalists) tend to prefer product-based startups as they see it as a safer bet. But, now, that trend is slowly changing.”
Last year, Airattix drew revenue of ₹4 crore and this year (2026), Aditya’s target is ₹12 crore. “This year, in just one month, our revenue is ₹1.10 crore. We will easily cross our target!” he said enthusiastically. What has bolstered his confidence is the recognition from the Government of India, which, last year, awarded Airattix for being innovative and promoting a circular economy in the Supply Chain and Logistics space.
The company now plans to raise $2 million for use in making its technology more robust with Artificial Intelligence (AI), as well as opening some brick-and-mortar storage spaces. “We have shortlisted six such spaces as of now,” said Aditya. Other plans in the pipeline are adding more temple towns like Varanasi, Ujjain, Haridwar, Katra, and Kumh Melas as well. Aditya said, “We also want to digitise the cloakrooms at the railway stations. We have a good SaaS (Software as a Service) to do so.”
Five years since its launch, Airattix is in 20 Indian cities and Kathmandu. And, there’s no stopping as it moves full steam ahead. “We plan to be in all Tier-1 and Tier-2 cities and have our presence in at least 50 cities in the next two years,” said the young entrepreneur, confidence matching his words as also his steps.
